A COLD AND FROSTY MORNING

Alma Warren, barely out of bed and naked in the monstrous bathroom mirror, staring bleary at her sagging fifty-three-year-old flesh and still fancying herself something rotten. She finds her enduring vanity almost heroic in the scale of its delusion. She’s prepared to face the facts, safe in the knowledge that the facts will only scream and run away. All things considered, she’s a funny piece of work.

The big square bathroom with its plaster-rounded corners is a blunted cube of gray steam rising from the eight-foot chasm of the filling tub, an ostentatious lifeboat made from tide-lined fiberglass. Subjected to this sweltering rain-forest climate every morning for at least ten years the chamber’s blue and gold-veined lining paper has begun to droop down from the ceiling’s curve, a wilted winter sunrise. At the bottom of the giant bath itself there are the studs of an unused Jacuzzi fixture, gilt flaked off to show the dull gray metal underneath. Alma has never really had the knack of keeping something nice.

She picks a bath bomb from the green glass fruit bowl on the counter, Fairy Jasmine from the fragrant branch of Lush down in the Grosvenor Center, lobs it casually into the deep hot water and takes childish pleasure from the scum of blue metallic glitter that seethes up out of the fizz and foment. She’ll have sequined cheeks, hands, hair and sheets for a few days but, on the plus side, will be living in the early 1970s. Alma climbs up onto the near end of the boxed-in miniature lagoon and strikes a pose like a high diver, squinting down into the steam until she can imagine that her bathtub is a massive reservoir as seen from several hundred feet above. She makes as if about to execute a swallow dove but then appears to change her mind and steps down carefully into her bath in the conventional fashion. This strange pantomime is something she does each day without having any idea why. She only hopes that nobody ever finds out about it.

With a pig-pink soap-bar redolent of Woolworths’ Pick’n’Mix she lathers herself everywhere then sluices it all off, relaxing back into the heat and suds until only her face is visible above the surface as a floating mask. The long hair drifts about her outsized skull like waterweed, becoming sleek and saturated as she listens to the ringing underwater noises that her bath makes inadvertently, the peeling gold tap’s rhythmic dripping and the amplified scrape of a toenail on the long tub’s molded sides. Alma feels comfortable, reduced to nothing but a bobbing face with all the rest of what she is concealed beneath the bubbles and the drifting clots of iridescent blue. This is essentially the strategy with which she faces life, believing that it lends her the advantage of surprise: there might be anything beneath the suds and sparkle, mightn’t there?

After an amniotic minute of submersion she sits up, hair a lank comma dribbling between her shoulder blades, and scoops a viscous palm-full of her lime and sea-salt shampoo from its pot, rubbing the gritty slime into her scalp. The product promises its user traffic-stopping shine and volume, although Alma is unable to remember the last time that she’d stopped traffic in a good way. Molding her hair forward in a lather-stiffened quiff that sags towards its dripping tip a good eight inches from her forehead, Alma mumbles “Thang yuh verrah much” into the humid fog, then rinses it all off using a peeling golden shower attachment. She is, she likes to believe, the spitting image of the King if he’d lived to be an old woman.

Once the strands are squeaking like violin strings, she turns off the nozzle and lies back, her sodden head draining into the folded towel that she’s forethoughtfully placed on the long tub’s pointed end. Stretched out full length and motionless, a dead Egyptian monarch whose sarcophagus has first been flooded and then strewn with glitter for unfathomable ritual purposes, Alma reviews her thoughts, such as they are at this time of a Friday morning. Near the surface, a storm-layer of nonsensical rage and resentment is subsiding gradually into this foamy interlude between her breakfast Shreddies, her sensible daily aspirin and her bio-yogurt drinks, already wolfed down, and her first joint of the day, which is still yet to come. Beneath this scum-line of residual anger is a tediously efficient secretary-strata, listing everything that Alma has to do today, Friday, May 26^th, 2006: finish the Chain of Office picture, pay her treacherous bloodsucking council tax, go to the bank, visit the little daycare nursery down near Doddridge Church to see if everything has been delivered safely for tomorrow’s exhibition. Oh, and shop for food in town, because there’s nothing in the fridge except for weird, exotic relishes and dips she’s bought while in an altered state. Perhaps she’ll pop her head into the Grosvenor Center branch of HMV to see if the new season of The Wire is out yet; maybe trawl the local-interest shelves at Waterstone’s, looking for photographs of sepia barges on a brown-ale river; lemming-waves of kids in 1950s swimming costumes running at the camera, splashing through the shallow end of the Midsummer Meadow lido.

Down below this relatively-tidy organizing level are the ceaselessly-rotating cogs and flywheels of creative process. These are anxiously reviewing minor irritations in completed works – the central white-haired laborer in Work in Progress for example, looking back across his shoulder at the audience with eyes perhaps too stern and frightening – or else are sifting patiently through possibilities for paintings yet to come. She has a nebulous idea that involves tracking down the sites depicted by great, bygone landscape artists, recreating the same view in the same medium, with all the car-crammed motorways and modern alterations rendered classically in lustrous oils with patient glazes, freezing a degraded present in the unforgiving gaze of a more able past. There’s something in the notion that appeals to her, but it’s too glib and obvious in its present form. Besides, she’ll have had five ideas as good or better before she retires tonight. Alma’s attention skitters over this and other fledgling projects pretty much nonstop, even while other areas of her awareness are engaged in pressing matters of their own, such as pretending that whomever she is talking to has her complete attention.

Under this productive and untiring shop-floor of the mind we next encounter the vast, monitor-lit basement complex of a super-villainess, where part of Alma’s too-elaborate personality sits in a swivel chair among the shifting screens and contemplates deranged agendas. These include affecting the development of culture by the subtle introduction of extreme ideas, which, if pursued, will almost certainly precipitate widespread apocalyptic psychological collapse. This will fulfill Alma’s ambition, having first gone mad herself, of taking everyone else with her. Then, of course, there’s the ongoing scheme to argue her way out of death, which is progressing rather nicely. She sits swiveling and chuckling in her imaginary lair, but does not stroke a cat, having anticipated that her stature as a villainess would be severely undercut by the predictable and obvious sexual pun. Instead, when circumstance requires, she strokes a raucous and red-crested cock.

Descending further there are Jungian catacombs of alchemy, kabbalah, numerology and tarot, paranormal residues resulting from her still-current preoccupation with the occult. She decodes the day around her in accordance with the correspondence-tables of Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Dee, Aleister Crowley, all the other occult heavyweights. Today’s a Friday, Freitag, Vendredi, day of the planet Venus and the number seven, a good female day in all. Its colors are three shades of green with amber as a complement. Its perfume is attar of rose, its metal copper. This specific zone of Alma’s consciousness allows itself to be productively distracted by the tangential idea of roses, following a fragile thread of free-association starting with Diana Spencer, “Goodbye, England’s Rose”, Taupin and John’s camp Monroe eulogy refitted for another blond girl dead of cameras, misplaced ambition, and betrayal. The funeral cortège that Alma’s brother Mick had watched, bringing the body home along the summer motorway, thrown blossoms wilting on the bonnet, vivid on the dull gunmetal of the casket. Utter silence from the crowds beside the road. Northamptonshire, Rose of the Shires. The rose originates in Turkey, only red or white varieties available, and it is introduced in Europe by returned crusaders, many of these coming back here to the town where their crusades had started. Proving popular, the flower, in its two distinct shades, is eventually adopted as a symbol by the Houses of both Lancaster and York, with their subsequent conflict settled at the Battle of Cow Meadow, between Beckett’s Park and Delapré across the river. Blood and roses, a repetitive motif across the printed fabric of Northampton’s muddy skirt.

A little further down are Alma’s feelings, her emotional component, a far sunnier and less nightmarish pasture than appearances might lead one to suppose. In this enclosure, all of Alma’s friends and pets and family, alive or dead, frolic amid enactments of her treasured moments. These might represent a dream, a first kiss, or that funny afternoon when she’d been nine, taking a long-cut home through Greyfriars flats down Scarletwell Street, noticing the bush, the single dangling caterpillar. All of Alma’s positive experiences are rerouted here for long-term storage. All her negative experiences are fed to an appalling thing with turquoise eyes, kept in a pen behind the recreation area and only taken out for walks upon special occasions.

Under all of this is Alma’s soul, the Real of her that cannot be expressed, which is a lovely and ingeniously fashioned artifact, if possibly a little showy and impractical. Essentially, it is that of a serious-minded yet imaginative and very clever seven-year-old girl, and at the moment is dissolving blissfully into the jasmine-scented, sapphire-dusted currents of a scalding hot bath.

When she starts experiencing pangs of proletarian guilt at her minor-celebrity indulgence, which takes only a few minutes in a tub of this preposterous size, she sits up suddenly and pulls the plug out. Leaping from the bath, she tries to dry herself and get her clothes on before all the water has drained gurgling away, a habit that she used to think of as simple efficiency but has since realized is just part of her quite ordinary individual madness. Finally, triumphantly, having completed dressing while the last few nebulae of foam and glitter are still circling the plug’s black hole by the simple expedient of not bothering with any underwear, she slings her robe over the banister and thunders down the stairs. It’s half-past seven in the morning and time to commence her hectic and demanding schedule of attempting to intimidate the planet’s other occupants. It’s not that Alma finds this wholly self-imposed task difficult, especially. It’s just that there’s so many of them, and so little time.

Downstairs, amid a clutter of rare book and uncompleted canvas that is only reassuring to Alma herself, she fills her space-age kettle-jug and switches on its eerie blue light before settling into her armchair and beginning the construction of her first jazz cigarette. These ostentatiously long items, accurately labeled as “nine-inch Gauloise dick-compensators” by her one-time visitor Alexei Sayle, are a leftover from her younger days when she still went to parties and contrived a reefer long enough to still have something left for herself after it had circumnavigated a room full of people. When her partial deafness and increasing weariness with alcohol led to Alma foregoing parties and most often smoking on her own while working, she simply forgot to modify the length, that’s all. It’s not that she’s a drug-glutton or anything.

When all ten Rizla papers have been glued into a white flag of surrender and the filling of tobacco added, Alma cooks the blunt end of a bar of hash over her Zippo lighter. This current variety, which as a teenager she would have recognized as coming from Afghanistan or Pakistan, has more than likely been renamed Taliban Black to suit the present situation. She reflects upon this as she crumbles the still-smoldering resin into the tobacco, burning her almost entirely nerveless left thumb and forefinger in the process. Next there comes a scrabbling carpet-rolling motion and a swift pass of the gummed edge across Alma’s tongue, a twist at one end and a neat insertion of rolled cardboard at the other, all before her blue-lit orgone-kettle in the kitchen has stopped bubbling. She pours the boiling water, spattering, into a horribly discolored BEST AT EVERYTHING mug, guides the sizzling torrent so that it falls on the center of the circular gray teabag and inflates it satisfyingly into a pillow of trapped heat. Mashing it up against the cup’s side with her spoon to squeeze the last drop of its vital juices out, she flips the spent and steaming carcass into her conveniently open pedal bin. Foregoing milk and sugar – she prefers her beverages “black and bitter, how I like my men” – Alma transports the brimming mug back to her living room, her armchair and her waiting contraband cheroot.

Behind her chair there is an arching stained-glass panel where gold stars mark the positions of the kabbalistic spheres against a deep royal blue grading into aquamarine. The low sun through the room’s rear window falls through this and drenches Alma in cobalt and yellow radiance as she lights up the cigarette. The painted stars break eggs onto the cyan glaze of her wet hair. She holds the smoke in for a moment and then sits back and exhales into the gathering indigo, luxuriating in her own identity, in the incessant fun and mostly-pleasant strain of simply being her.

As the cloud-chamber of her consciousness begins to warm up, turbines whirring into life as it approaches normal operating speed, she reaches for the nearest page of print to give her rapidly engaging mental processes a point of focus. This turns out to be the latest issue of New Scientist, dated May 4^th, open at an intriguing article concerning Alma’s favorite science philosopher, the beautifully-named Gerard ’t Hooft, whose criticisms of string theory she’d been so impressed by. It seems that ’t Hooft has formulated a hypothesis which would, if proven, finally resolve the quandaries of quantum indeterminacy; would resolve them right out of existence, if Alma is reading it correctly. The philosopher apparently suggests that there’s a deeper and more fundamental level, as yet undiscovered, underlying the mysterious quantum world. ’T Hooft predicts that once we have developed tunneling microscopes that can reveal this previously unsuspected layer of reality we’ll find that Heisenberg’s idea of particles existing in a wide variety of states until observed is an illusion based upon misunderstanding.

Reading all this between alternating sips of tea and smoke, Alma allows herself the guttural chortle of an ogre who’s just realized where the schoolchildren are hiding. She can spot a well-constructed dangerous idea when she sees one, and ’t Hooft’s proposal strikes her as one of the most ingenious conceptual land mines that she’s ever heard of. The idea’s attractions are immediately apparent. Quantum indeterminacy is the stumbling block preventing any easy resolution of the vast discrepancies between the quantum world-view and the classically-constructed universe of Einstein, Newton and the rest. If tiny subatomic particles behave according to the Lewis Carroll laws that govern quantum physics, then why do entirely different laws govern the stars and planets? The attempts thus far to reconcile the quantum microcosm with the classic macrocosm have led to such mind-wrenching extravagances as string theory, notions that require extra dimensions, ranging between ten and twenty-six, before the mathematics will make sense.

That’s not to say that the string theorists might not be correct, Alma observes, but simply to suggest that to her ear it all sounds rather messy and unnecessary. If ’t Hooft is right, however, and there is no quantum indeterminacy, then the problem vanishes to leave a unified field theory which accounts for everything without resorting to exotic explanations that can often raise more questions than they answer. She can see how many scientists would find ’t Hooft’s hypothesis hard to resist, but then there is that other shoe to fall: if there’s no quantum indeterminacy, then there’s no free will. That, right there, is the problem, and in Alma’s estimation it has the potential to make all the other current disputes between Christianity and science pale by comparison.

That’s why she’s laughing as she reads. It’s all this free will business and the way that everybody gets so jittery about it, even thinkers that she has the greatest of respect for. Alma, having worked all year upon her brother Warry’s near-death vision, has grown very comfortable with predetermination, with the idea of life as a great recurrence that we reeexperience, unvaryingly and eternally. During this time, though, she’s learned that both Nietzsche and one of her idols, the Brixton-based artist and magician Austin Osman Spare, have previously formulated almost the same concept but then shied away from it because of the implied negation of free will.

Alma can’t see what all the fuss is over. She’s convinced that no one really needs free will as long as there is a sustainable illusion of the same to stop everyone going mad. It also seems to her that our perception of free will depends upon the scale at which we view the issue. Looking at a single individual, it’s obviously impossible to accurately forecast what will happen to that person during, say, the next five years. This would seem to support the argument for free will and a future that is not yet written. On the other hand, if we consider a large group of people, such as the few thousand souls inhabiting the Boroughs or an average modern sink estate, then our predictions become frighteningly easy and precise. We can state, near enough exactly, just how many people will get sick, get stabbed, get pregnant, lose their jobs, their homes, have minor triumphs on the Lottery, will beat their partners or their kids, will die from cancer or heart failure or sheer blind accident. It strikes her, sitting in the rich blue light and finishing her smoke, that this is the same quandary faced by the physicists, translated into a context of sociology. Why is free will, like quantum indeterminacy, only evident when we look at the microcosm, at a single person? Where does free will disappear to when we turn our gaze upon the larger social masses, on the populations that are the equivalent of stars and planets?

Stubbing out the joint she puts the magazine aside and starts to roll another one. The mug of iron-black tea, only three-quarters finished, has grown cold with small tan platelets formed upon its surface like a skin. She’ll make a fresh cup before she gets down to work in a few minutes, now her hair’s not dripping anymore.

Still musing on the subject of Gerard ’t Hooft she drifts through the next slice of time to find herself stood at her easel by the window, with a newly-filled and steaming mug upon the high table beside her, near the ashtray and the as-yet-unlit second joint propped on its lip. She holds a double-zero brush in her right hand, dead still and horizontal like the raised spear of a patient jungle hunter, unblinking and confident her prey will make a movement before she does. It will give itself away, the image or the line that she is looking for, and then her short dart will stab forward, tipped with poison color.

On the easel is the final piece to be completed before Alma’s exhibition opens up its playschool doors tomorrow morning. The last-minute nature of the painting is due to the fact that Alma didn’t make her mind up to include it until fairly recently. Entitled Chain of Office, it’s an afterthought, a kind of visual epilogue to the preceding works. It shows a single figure, standing posed as though for an official mayoral portrait, on an indistinct and drifting field of almost drinkable green pointillism, a deep emerald smolder. The imposing subject, features still unfinished, stands draped in a strange and ornate ceremonial robe that hides the contours of its body, which could just as easily be male or female. Lacking a completed face to rest upon, the eye is drawn to the exotic and cascading fabric of the gown, which, upon close examination, seems to be what the whole picture is about. The intricate design of detailed scenes set in irregularly contoured panels, linked by a gold filigree of branching lines, turns out to be a lavishly illuminated map of Alma’s former neighborhood, from Sheep Street to Saint Andrew’s Road, from Grafton Street to Marefair. On the decorated hem is a motif of paving stones, each individually cracked and weathered, fringed with seams of bright viridian moss. The cuff-buttons are glued-on snail-shells. Isomorphic images of Doddridge Church, bulging with ranting puritans, seem to be painted or embroidered on the garment’s folds, with Spring Lane School and Scarletwell Street sliding from a hanging pleat into the crease’s umber.

The imposing figure stands with both hands raised in welcome or in benediction, draped in its astounding coat of maps. Hung round the neck, in a dull gray that stands out strikingly against the riotous surrounding color of the vestments, is the dented gong of an old saucepan lid attached to what appears to be a length of lavatory chain.

Alma’s one problem with the piece is that she can’t decide whose face this splendid Boroughs totem should be wearing. Philip Doddridge’s, perhaps? Black Charley’s? What about the sweet owl roundness of Alma’s beloved and deceased Aunt Lou, lost in a lightning storm? No. No, that will look wrong, perched on an already-completed body that is differently proportioned. She puts down her hovering brush and picks the joint up, lighting the touch-paper twist. After a pull or two, she sets the fuming column back down in the ashtray and retrieves her brush, having arrived at a decision.

For the next two hours she works upon the face until she’s satisfied, then spends a further half hour gazing love-struck at the finished painting, basking in her own magnificence. Finally, her vanity starts to exhaust her. Alma feels she’s earned a break.

She stands, with a theatrical sciatic groan, and slouches out into the kitchen where she fries up sliced halloumi while a brace of pitta pockets puff and fatten in the oven. When the thick-cut steaks of cheese have taken on a leathery autumnal mottle she retrieves them from the pan; slips them inside the pouches of warm bread with an accompanying spill of mixed leaf salad and some guillotined tomatoes. She can never eat halloumi without feeling a misguided sense of vegetarian guilt. This is because her first taste of the fibrous and salt Greek delicacy, decades earlier, had led her to assume that the halloumi was a possibly-endangered species of Cypriot fish. Even though she knows better now, she still can’t shake the frisson of forbidden and delicious flesh that comes with every carefully-chewed mouthful, and in fact she rather likes it that way.

After she’s devoured whichever meal her hasty fry-up was supposed to represent – elevenses or brunch or lunkfast (her own coinage) – Alma gets rid of the plate and rolls another smoke. Having completed Chain of Office an hour earlier than she’d anticipated she has time to pick over a couple of her other projects, maybe make laborious, autistic-looking jottings in block capitals across whatever unmarked pages she can find in one of several workbooks. She has never mastered joined-up handwriting. Along with tying shoelaces the ordinary way, it is a skill that she experienced initial problems with and instantly gave up on, stubbornly resolving that she’d come up with her own approach to things and stick with it, even if it was obviously wrong. This is the formative decision, made when she was seven, that has shaped her entire subsequent existence. In a recent interview, when asked if the political upheaval of the 1960s had caused Alma’s fiercely individual approach to life, her puzzling response of, “No, it was those fucking shoelaces” apparently became the subject of much speculation on the message boards she never saw but only heard about.

Settling back into her chair, her nest of curling vapor ribbons, she picks up the nearest blank-paged and hard-covered exercise book from the cluttered coffee table on her left, scooping up a blue ballpoint pen that still looks viable while doing so. She makes a few notes on the possible autobiography that she’s considered writing, which at present isn’t much more than a paragraph or two about her naan, May, and a working title, We Was Poor But We Was Cannibals. Alma composes a few dozen chapter headings, phrases that seem funny, resonant or smugly clever to her, and makes tiny notes beside each one suggesting what ideas or episodes that chapter might include. The details and the actual meat of things can all be worked out later, on the hoof, on wings and prayers.

Conveniently satisfied with her half-hour’s work just as she is starting to get bored with it, she puts the workbook down and reaches for whichever paperback or magazine or comic is closest to hand. As it transpires, this is a polythene-bagged copy of Forbidden Worlds, seemingly issue 110, dated March-April 1963 and published by the long-since vanished ACG, or American Comics Group. Being both sick and tired of the protracted adolescence typifying the contemporary comic business, publications of this vintage are almost the only ones that Alma will allow into the house.

Removing the frail pamphlet gently from the elderly and wilting plastic of its envelope, Alma examines the admittedly completely crappy covers, front and back. The rear is an advertisement, in black and white, for an impressive catalog of novelties from Honor House Productions, boldly labeled as a “TREASURE CHEST OF FUN”. The fun seems to involve confusing adults with ventriloquism, frightening them with a cigarette-dispensing lighter that “looks like a Browning automatic”, or increasing their nuclear anxiety with an Atomic Smoke Bomb: “Just light one and watch the column of white smoke rise to the ceiling, mushrooming into a dense cloud like an A-Bomb.” These cost twenty cents. Also available are silent dog-whistles, Ju-Jitsu lessons promising that YOU, TOO, CAN BE TOUGH, a deck of marked cards and the snappily-described SEE BEHIND GLASSES that “enable you to see behind you without anyone knowing you’re watching. Really comes in handy at times.” Struggling to imagine on precisely which occasions these wing-mirrored spectacles would “really come in handy”, other than if she should be compelled to back her massive head out of a cul-de-sac, she turns instead to the front cover, all in citrus color with its oversize seal of approval from the once-important Comics Code Authority and the black “9d” imprint of a British newsagent stamped on the planet-decorated logo.

The front image, by an artist Alma doesn’t recognize, is clearly a generic piece of cover artwork pulled from the inventory. It shows a thuggish-looking monk clad in green robe and hood grimacing from within a fortuneteller’s crystal ball. A blue-tinged cover blurb appended to the illustration tries to justify it by pretending that the sulky-looking figure in the snow-globe is “just ONE” of various menaces that the anthology’s single continuing character, Herbie, would meet inside. Flicking through two or three nondescript tales of strange adventure to the Herbie story at the back, the only reason that she’s kept the tattered comic-book, Alma discovers that this is the ruse she had suspected. The green monk is nowhere to be seen throughout the ten-page yarn, a favorite of Alma’s called “Herbie and the Sneddiger’s Salad Oil”.

Herbie had been created several issues previously in what may have been intended as a one-off tale. Readers, however, were intrigued by its protagonist, a spherical and solemn schoolboy with a bowl-cut hairdo, horn-rimmed glasses, unexpected supernatural powers and an unusual obsession with fruit-flavored lollipops. Due to this favorable response the character appeared more frequently from then on, clad in his trademark attire of weirdly scaled-down adult clothing with blue pants, white shirt and a black tie. While obviously not a look that everyone could get away with, Herbie would have bailed out of Forbidden Worlds within a year of issue 110 and be established as the title character in his own comic, of which Alma owns a very-near complete collection.

The main reason for this singular compulsion is Alma’s infatuation with the strip’s distinctively obsessive artist, Ogden Whitney. Whitney, working in the business since the 1940s, had a drawing style that somehow managed to take smothering suburban blandness to extremes which should have been the envy of the avant-garde. His tidily-coiffured cast of generic middle-class Americans might have stepped from a magazine ad for soap-powder, cars or coffee were it not for a conspicuous lack of grinning toothy confidence. Instead, his characters wear tight expressions of barely-suppressed anxiety as they stand hesitating in the kitchens of their uniform white-painted homes or loiter upon bright green lawns so neatly-shorn as to be utterly devoid of texture, mere outlines left for the colorist to fill. And then, amid this twitchy Cold War landscape with its populace of clenched neurotics, there is the still, planetary mass of Herbie Popnecker.

According to the legend, ACG house-writer Richard Hughes, writing under the pseudonym of Shane O’Shea, had become fascinated by the way in which the literal-minded Whitney would draw anything the script required of him in the same blandly realistic style. Possibly to amuse himself, the writer’s scripts become more comically surreal as the series progresses, treating the already baffled readership to strange encounters between the impassive levitating dumpling-child and a selection of then-current film-stars and world leaders like the Kennedys, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, Queen Elizabeth the Second, or the Burtons. Typically, female celebrities are smitten with the spherical and enigmatic ten-year-old. Ladybird Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, Liz Taylor and Her Majesty the Queen all sigh and heave their bosoms as he walks away into the sky with an expression of supreme indifference, an unlikely fanny-magnet sucking jadedly upon a lollipop as round as he is.

All these real-life luminaries coexist contentedly with things from outer space, broom-riding witches, talking animals, anthropomorphic objects and the supernatural denizens of ACG’s distinctive green-tinged afterlife. This occult region, carpeted in limeade-colored clouds, is a Rod Serling version of Eternity that features intermittently across the outfit’s other books and is referred to as “The Unknown” on what looks like a hand-painted sign in its cumulus-strewn reception area. The place is an abode of sheet-clad ghosts, trolls, leprechauns and monsters cribbed from Universal Studios’ back catalog, along with wingless, robed custodians who seem like biliously-hued Frank Capra angels, tubby and avuncular. It distantly occurs to Alma that she may well have been influenced in some way by this secular, fantastical and folksy view of paradise while realizing Warry’s childhood vision in the paintings and the illustrations she’s been working on for this last year. Despite the lack of any similarity between their styles, Alma’s elaborate depiction of a higher Boroughs filled with dreams and fiends and phantoms probably owes a great deal to Ogden Whitney’s staid surrealism.

On the other hand she is aware that Whitney’s merits, many though they be, are merely camouflage to mask the actual nature of her interest in his work. This is entirely based on Alma’s extreme identification with the artist’s best-known character. She’d been a portly little lump herself before her frankly terrifying growth-spurt and, like Whitney’s hero, had endured a pudding-basin haircut. She had also shared Herbie’s conviction that the powers and forces of the universe should all know her by name and have the basic common sense to get out of her way. In the adventure that she’s holding in her red-nailed strangler’s hands, “Herbie and the Sneddiger’s Salad Oil”, the omnipotent schoolboy scares away a full grown Frankenstein, a barrage of machine-gun bullets that have worried little faces and which swerve from their trajectory on recognizing Herbie, lion-headed alien dinosaurs from the beleaguered planet Bertram, and even such astronomical phenomena as an aggressive comet, which veers from its course in panic at its first sight of the lollipop-addicted human bowling ball. As Alma sees it, this is no more than the same polite respect which she expects rampaging elephants, Cruise missiles, werewolves, corporations, bolts of lightning and invading spacemen to extend to her.

Another reason for her empathy is Herbie’s eyes, both for the heavy-lidded bored look that she knows from her own baby-photographs and for the ugly spectacles that he’s apparently compelled to wear. That’s how she could have ended up, what with the almost useless left eye that she has inherited from her mom, Doreen. She had only managed to avoid a pair of National Health face-deformers by the application of her seven-year-old ingenuity. When taken by her mother for a mandatory school eye-test, Alma had glanced at the chart in passing and had memorized it, top to bottom, utilizing the extraordinary powers of recall that neither her school-friends nor family had noticed yet, and which she hadn’t been in any hurry to inform them of. The school optician had clamped Alma’s outsized head in Clockwork Orange goggles, then had pointed to the hovering gray blurs that floated in the fog while she reeled out a list of letters that she couldn’t see for toffee. This technique had kept her glasses-free until her teenage years, when the eye-test procedure had been altered unexpectedly and Alma had been caught out as a half-blind fraud with an almost vampiric sensitivity to light. She’d subsequently been made to endure two years of thin frames and blue-tinted lenses that had somehow managed to make her look even more pretentious than she was already. When one lens fell out and shattered, Alma’s colorblind optician had replaced it with pink-tinted glass that made her look like someone from the audience of a 3D film. By then, she’d made her mind up that her vision without glasses was deteriorating, and this latest outrage had just piled insult on injury. She’d thrown the two-tone spectacles away, resolving that if she was going to go blind then she’d do it on her own terms, thank you very much. Later she’d learned that wearing no lenses at all produced what was known as a “negative lensing effect” within the muscles of the eye that actually improves the vision. Or is it a positive lensing effect? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that in Alma’s own estimation, she’s been proven right. It’s Alma one, opticians nil, as far as she’s concerned.

Returning her attention to the story she is reading, Alma thinks again of Ogden Whitney, of his sad demise as detailed in Art out of Time, the lovely volume that Mike Moorcock sent her as a thank you for her cover illustration on a recently reissued Elric paperback. Within the wonderful collection of neglected and peculiar comic strips from bygone times, Alma had been delighted to see a characteristically demented Herbie offering included, with accompanying text about the artist. She’d been touched if unsurprised to learn that Herbie’s looks and general physique were based on those of Ogden Whitney as a child, and had filled up with tears to read how he had died, forgotten and insane from booze in an asylum. She imagines Herbie in his sixties, sitting in the day room at the home, white shirt and blue pants traded in for a stained bathrobe and his differently-powered lollipops replaced by bottles. The time-travel bottle-pop would be the only one that worked. His sleepy eyes gazing unfocused through thick beer-glass lenses and his paunch now drum-tight with the enlarged liver. Graying, bowl-cut head filled with his flat, precisely-drawn dementia, lion-dragons and Sneddiger’s Salad Oil, the many ghosts and featured creatures of a green Unknown.

Taking a last pull on the sepia-streaked stub she grinds it out and stands up with another creaking outcry at the dull ache in her back. She’s barely consciously aware she makes these noises anymore, so constant and repetitive have they become. Sorting among the notebooks, comics, pens and paperbacks Alma locates a hairbrush that has somehow managed to survive its daily skirmish with her head. This one, a sturdy wooden item that is capable of ‘MEGA Taming’ if one pays attention to the printed promise on its handle, has already lasted for over a year with no more than a dozen or so of its plastic teeth wrenched out. Its predecessors, that have snapped in two or have been otherwise dismantled by their first or second painful drag through Alma’s tangled locks, were simpering pansies by comparison.

She’s learned early in life that if she doesn’t brush her mane once every day it will develop knots that in a week will have turned to impacted rhino horn; bolls of mahogany that it will take tree-surgeons, chainsaws, ropes and ladders to remove. Closing her eyes she starts to pull the brush down from the crown, her face immediately concealed behind a gray-brown safety curtain as the bristles rake excruciatingly through the unyielding snarls. The sound of ripping follicles and snapping vinyl prongs, she has discovered, make the ritual far more upsetting for anyone forced to listen to it than it is for her. Her artist friend Melinda Gebbie, would sit covering her ears and whimpering if she were witness to a brushing, frightened that Alma would yank part of her skull away while Alma was herself apparently oblivious to this self-scalping. Her relationship with pain has largely been one of indifference since she realized that its actual physical component rarely hurt that much, and that it is the psychological and the emotional attached files that do all the harm. As far as she is able, therefore, she has disconnected hurtful physical sensations from accompanying mental reflexes of shock or fear or anger. As a minor byproduct of this largely successful process, Alma is no longer even ticklish. She terrorizes those who are with absolute impunity.

The worst part of the ordeal is now over. Alma’s giant head is now concealed within a church bell made of hair, so that if they should view her from the shoulders upwards, onlookers would have no clue as to which way round she was standing. Lifting both hands, Alma scrabbles with her scarlet fingernails down what feels like the middle of her Rushmore cranium in order to create a center parting, dragging back the faded auburn curtains to each side so that she can peer at the mirror hung above the fireplace and weigh up the result. Alma decides that she particularly likes the vagrant ash-and-copper strand that snakes across her almost-blind left eye, which is her scariest one, possibly because it’s governed by the mad pre-verbal basilisk of her right brain. Alma’s right eye is the humane and twinkling one which understands that it’s preferable if people – humans as she calls them – like her and aren’t frightened off by her appearance or behavior. Conversely, Alma’s left eye clearly doesn’t give a fuck. It glowers, gray and yellow and unfocused, from beneath an overhanging forehead that swells gently into noticeable bumps, as if she’s either growing horns or a new frontal lobe.

Hair sorted, Alma paints a face on in the style pioneered by Mr. Potato Head. Her eyelashes soon sag beneath the weight of the mascara and resemble the deleted giant spider scene from the original King Kong. Next, pouting like Mick Jagger before the embalmers got to him, she coats her lips in a bloody impasto of red lippy. She believes that this wards off potential rapists and the like by making her appear to be the more voracious sexual predator. Finally satisfied, she grins at her reflection. Every day is Halloween for Alma.

Pulling on an ancient leather jacket, its lapels hung with a fat crop of outdated causes thick as August blackberries, she’s almost ready to confront the yammering planet and stare down reality again, but first she has to put her rings and finger-armor on. A splendidly malevolent array of jointed metal talons, sculpted scorpions and rearing silver snakes alongside a selection of big, colorful and bruising gemstones, these lethal adornments probably contribute more than the carnivorous lipstick to her rape-proofing, she realizes upon the rare occasions when she thinks realistically. One slap and an assailant’s features would be hanging off in strips of soggy wallpaper. She’d do it, too. She’d once informed her brother Warry that although she almost thought of him as family, she’d open him without a second’s hesitation like a tin of Hula Hoops.

Making sure she’s got her checkbook and her key, she hurls herself along a cluttered hallway that has swathes of gold stars licking up its walls, out through a specially-carved front door with twin snakes in a caduceus design, down her front path onto East Park Parade. Its York stone paving slabs are bathed in clear blond sunlight, a presentiment of summer, with the lovely trilobite erosions of an ancient riverbed picked out in sharp relief. Across the busy Kettering Road are the tall trees that edge the Racecourse, a green fringe around the immense parkland’s mile-wide lampshade sky. People walk on the broad gray paths in ones and twos or cut an independent course across the rolling sea of grass. Someone is trying to fly a kite, perhaps in an attempt to recreate some cherished illustration from a 1950s kids’ encyclopedia, the washed-out yellow diamond faltering against a faded blue. Suspiciously enormous crows patrol the rippling turf, a bigger and more confident crowd of them every year, too many to be called collectively a murder these days. This is more a Harold Shipman of the fucking things.

Her indoor lungs adjusting rapidly to the cold drafts of breath that she sucks down, Alma turns left as she commences her walk into town. Her Dr. Martens scuff against the pavement’s fossil fronds and her mind floods with random ideas and associations, words and pictures snagging on the shop-front scenery that rattles by the other way as Alma hits her stride. She thinks about the flagstones vanishing beneath her tread, the only view afforded to the downcast, irrespective of which century they happen to be in. The old stones, obviously, remain unchanged since the nineteenth, but there are nuances to the discerning eye: deficiencies of dog-shit; chocolate wrappers that have been rebranded so as not to further mystify touring Americans; unfathomable particle-collider tags in whorls and spirals of white spray. Across the road a distant man attempts to steer some kind of sail-powered car across the Racecourse but the wind has dropped and he’s becalmed among the strutting crows and the abruptly plunging kites. If there’s no wind before it gets dark she supposes that the meadow-mariner is doomed. Despite the extra lighting that the vast and, by night, absolutely black expanse has relatively recently acquired, it’s still referred to as “The Rapecourse” by a healthy number of the town’s inhabitants.

She crosses from East Park Parade over Abington Avenue’s tail-end and carries on down Kettering Road. George Woodcock – Alma’s Arts Lab crony from her teenage years – had written a long, neon-lighted poem on this crumbling thoroughfare, a jeweled urban lament entitled Main Street, just before he’d jacked in all the literary bollix and become a trucker. She can still see lines and phrases from the since-lost epic, smeared and tangled in the cobbled gutters; on the replaced plastic drainpipes. She can still see all the vanished incidents and nights and people that the lines referred to, former selves from several bygone decades striding up and down the shabby avenue, a noisy nineteen-year-old drunk girl in a posse of small-town bohemians, an angry-looking Gas Board office worker stamping her way home through drizzle on another Friday afternoon, a forty-something mad witch in a black cloak with a horde of Alcopop-emboldened simpletons calling her “Grotbags”, “lez” or “minger” from the safety of their passing vehicles if she goes out to do a bit of shopping. The town’s streets are like a living palimpsest to Alma, all the layers still intact, everyone still alive and everything still going on, the misguided romances and the rows, the shimmering acid trips, the hasty fucks in doorways.

This perception of a simultaneous eternity, while she’s had intimations of it on and off throughout her life, has only flared up into vivid actuality since she’s been working on these paintings. The idea, once fully formulated, was so dazzlingly obvious that she remains amazed at having reached the age of fifty-something without clearly understanding it: time as an everlasting solid in which nothing changes, nothing dies. It had been right before her eyes for all those years, and she’d not known what she was looking at until that moment with her brother in the Golden Lion when the penny finally dropped. The moment of apocalypse and revelation, almost like that time in Greyfriars’ flats when she’d been dawdling home from Spring Lane School at dinnertime. Down in the little patch of shrubbery at the bottom of the washing-line enclosure there’d been a single translucent grub or caterpillar hanging by a thread from one leaf of a bush that Alma didn’t know the name of. She had stood there staring at it for perhaps a minute, and then something strange had happened –

A black cab growls past and honks its horn. Unable to see clearly who the driver is, Alma lifts one metallic claw and waves convivially to his rearview mirror. She gets on with all the local cabbies and they sometimes give her free rides into town if they should see her walking that way in inclement weather. To be honest she gets on with nearly everyone, which somewhat undermines the petrifying gorgon image that she’s worked so long and hard to put together. If this situation should persist she’ll have to chop up some Girl Guides in order to regain her rep.

Across the street, the mutable and transient hoardings flicker past. Charity outlets with batty proprietors and racks of cardigans that someone’s died in, Caribbean grocer-shops all facing north with no sun for the crated yams that languish in pink shadow. Alma sniggers at the name of one establishment, Butt Savories, although at her age you’d hope she’d be more mature. A little further down the road is a kebab-house, Embers, that makes her feel wistful for the days when it had been Rick’s Golden Fish Bar. Not that she had ever been a customer, but she had often entertained the fantasy of going in and being served with mushy peas and chips by Humphrey Bogart, who would eye her ruefully and drawl “Of all the golden fish bars in the world, she has to walk into mine.” Somewhere behind her, the rapid staccato beep of the Pelican crossing slides subliminally into her awareness, prompting her to hum the fast bit of “The Donkey Serenade” without having any clue why she is doing so. There is another crossing, back along the Kettering Road in Kingsley, with an even more up-tempo rhythm that can leave her whistling “The Saber Dance”. Susceptible as an eight-month-old baby and invulnerable as a pterodactyl made of diamonds, she continues into town.

A skinny boy in modern hair and spectacles stops in his tracks and gapes at her incredulously, face contorting in a rubbery cartoon expression which, if he were not so youthful, might be taken for a paralyzing stroke. Remembering she hasn’t bothered putting on her knickers, Alma glances down to make sure that the zipper on her jeans is still intact then realizes that the thunderstruck young man is an admirer. He tells her she’s Alma Warren, which she’s always grateful for. One of these days, when she’s gone wandering from the home, she’ll need that information. As he lists his favorite album sleeves, dust-jackets and comic-book covers Alma smiles, attempting to convey a girlish modesty but actually delivering the lipstick rictus and unblinking gaze of Conrad Veidt in a lost outtake from The Man Who Laughs. She shakes her stage-door Johnny’s nerveless mitt and thanks him for his kind words before carrying on down the Kettering Road, privately noting that his handshake had been far less manly than her own. Mind you, he more than likely hadn’t practiced since the age of ten like she had, red-faced as she squeezed a set of bathroom scales until she could exert her own substantial weight with just the pressure of her thumbs. Before she’d left Spring Lane she’d given two boys a good strangling for picking, ill-advisedly, on her or little Warry. One of them had been left with appalling bruises round his throat like a jet necklace and his mother had come to the school and yelled at Alma. This would seem to have been largely ineffectual in that to this day she hasn’t properly absorbed the concept of a measured and proportionate response to anything.

She trots over another crossing, this one with the slow beep of a faltering heart-monitor that doesn’t provoke any musical accompaniment on her part, to the street’s far side. After a few more grocers’ shops with enigmatic individual atmospheres and an outlet for decent-looking Hip Hop clothing she is crossing Grove Road, with the once-majestic bulk of the Essoldo cinema just up the way. As far as Alma can remember, it was in Grove Road during the 1970s that people had their windows blown out by an IRA bomb at the RAF club that was somewhere in the neighborhood. The government back then had been reluctant to describe the mess that everybody was involved in as a war of any kind, much less a war on terror. This had been before the war on drugs, of course, when launching military campaigns against abstract emotions or inanimate materials would have been seen as the behavior of highly-strung and over-reaching Daleks.

On the corner with the Kettering Road is Queensgrove Methodist Church, an impressive nineteenth-century red brick edifice that is today without the posse of nice-looking black guys who in slightly warmer weather decorate its steps. Less than a dozen paces further on Alma walks past the open-plan contemporary phone booth that has played host to a fatal stabbing only a few nights before. What a way to go out, she thinks, in a glass coffin that’s been shrink-wrapped with an ad for season two of Prison Break. It’s good to talk.

The way she heard it, both the victim and the perpetrators had been black, and Alma doesn’t care much for the U.S. cop-show ring that has about it. That isn’t the way she likes to think about Northampton being stacked. The town’s relationship with racial issues is a subtle and a complicated thing that goes back centuries, and simplifying it all down into a criminal profiler’s class-skewed vision of society seems both disastrous and highly probable to Alma. She thinks about Black Charley – Henry George – one of the first black faces to be seen about the county and, in 1897, a tremendous novelty. That sense of novelty had lasted up until at least the 1960s, when her mate Dave Daniels had been the first nonwhite pupil at the Grammar School on Billing Road. They’d run a full-page article about it in the Chronicle & Echo at the time, including a large photograph of David looking apprehensive, just in case he wasn’t feeling singled out enough already.

Back during the 70s and 80s, all the rudeys and the rastas had set up a club in the magnificent Salvation Army fort that used to stand on Sheep Street, just across the road from where Phil Doddridge founded his academy. Three floors of people with impeccably cool names like Elvis, Junior or Pedro, coming, going, children playing round their ankles and always a pot of bean stew simmering somewhere upstairs, that was the old Matta Fancanta club. Its antique boards had quaked in time with U-Roy or Lee Perry on the sound system, dub beats she’d been convinced were deep enough to make her womb fall out. As she remembers, it had been when vehicles that should have only been affordable to whites began to manifest in the adjoining car park that local authorities began to take an adverse interest in the place. The fort – which should have been, surely to God, a listed property – had been demolished, as if it had proven easier to pull it down than shut it down. There’s only the ubiquitous bare grass there now where it once stood, just down from the ass-backwards gargoyle mass of Greyfriars bus station, built wrong way round to start with and more recently voted to rank among the most disgusting buildings in the country. That had been that for the public face of genuine black culture in Northampton, or at least until comparatively recently. Now there is a Northamptonshire Black History Association that is setting all the records straight, and Alma has been hanging out with a determined, racially-diverse young bunch of rappers from the Boroughs that are trading under the collective name of Streetlaw, which she thinks is at the very least a cute coincidence. Justice above the street and all that. No, it isn’t all gloom for the black community by any means, assuming that it can resist the dead-end role that Hollywood’s casting departments and the major record labels are apparently considering it for: let’s make the underclass a glamourous and edgy place to be, then people won’t mind being stuck there quite so much and we can craft dramatically-lit and well-mastered versions of their struggle to sell back to them for the few quid they’ve not already spent on scratch cards. Everybody wins.

Alma walks on, past the arched entrance to a cobbled yard, an unmistakably Victorian construction that has “Dickens Brothers, Ltd” hand-lettered up above the archway. She suspects that elsewhere in the town there stands a black-beamed Tudor premises called “Shakespeare’s” and perhaps a “Chaucer & Sons” half-thatched cottage out near Hardingstone. Northampton, after all, is a well-labeled town. Once, from her window, she saw two vans pass each other, traveling in opposite directions on East Park Parade. One, possibly belonging to a mattress company, had the word DREAM stenciled upon its side. The other one, perhaps a television or computer retailer, was blazoned with the word REALITY. She’d noted that REALITY was heading for town center, which was unsurprising, while DREAM followed a trajectory that would eventually lead it to Kettering. She thought that it was more than likely going there to die.

Picking the pace up, on her right the storefronts melt into her slipstream, into one long smear of shop where you can get a Chinese meal, a drum-kit, a peyote cactus, a tattoo or a tattoo removed. She veers around a quorum of rough-looking blokes with beer-cans, who all nonetheless grin toothlessly and growl a cheerful “Hello, Alma” as she passes. Thirty seconds later a young policewoman in a Day-Glo lemon waistcoat beams and nods in recognition at the former menace to society turned local institution. She’s the queen of Kettering Road.

Tacking due west now, Alma executes a smooth curve opposite a shop-soiled Unitarian church and banks into Abington Square, past the unoccupied new properties which have replaced a scruffy row of shops that used to stand upon this rounded corner. She remembers her and David Daniels hiking round the newsagents and secondhand shops on Saturday mornings when they were thirteen, looking for comics or science fiction paperbacks, often paying a visit to the murky enterprise that hung on here, in the perpetual umbra of the church across the street. The owner had been an old lady with a bad cough who was always in her dressing gown and slippers, flecking ragged copies of Amazing Adult Fantasy and yellow-jacketed pornography alike with inadvertent sputum.

Alma feels protective of these vanished people, insufficiently noteworthy or attractive for the sepia retrospectives; these anonymous dust-bunnies who got lost forever underneath the huge, immobile wardrobe of the twentieth century. She wants to fill the crowd scenes in her paintings with them, wants to think of them suspended with their hours and habitats in time’s huge starry jelly, hanging there forever with their feuds and frailties intact, notes on the stave of a stupendous music.

On her right now is the Jaguar dealership, Guy Salmon, a name that has since become Alma’s pet euphemism with which to refer to male ejaculate. Abington Square unfolds around her. Up ahead, Charles Bradlaugh’s statue stands upon its traffic-island plinth, facing away from her towards Abington Street. Nice ass. She’s always rather fancied Bradlaugh, although more for his moral ferocity than for his physical allure if truth be told. Dishing out contraceptive literature with Annie Besant, knocking round with Swinburne, standing up for subjugated India so vocally that youthful devotee Mohandas Ghandi turned up at his funeral. A riot-precipitating atheist teetotaler and champion of the poor, Bradlaugh is Alma’s dream-date. Curiously, whenever she attempts to picture this she always sees herself arriving at the school dance with an animated statue, white stone splinters flaking from its joints with every step. During the slower numbers at the evening’s end they’d leave a swirling chalk-dust trail on the gymnasium floor behind them as they clung together for Wichita Lineman, and then afterwards he’d conscientiously discuss the need for contraception before trying to feel her up on the way home. She looks up at the chiseled figure with its finger pointing ever westward and can hear him bragging to his mates at the pub afterwards: “Here, Algernon, smell this.”

She’s giggling to herself as she strides on towards the junction with the Mounts and York Road, where the snarling, swearing horsepower of the trucks and Chelsea tractors is constrained by pretty lights. A small boy towed behind his carrier-laden mother stares at Alma disbelievingly. A man nudges his wife and mutters “Here, that’s Alma Warren” as she lollops past them, and outside the Bantam Cock three young lads produce copies of the Moorcock Elric book for her to sign. They don’t seem to be frightened of her, joking amiably as she scrawls her lazy autograph, and Alma finds she rather likes them. They inform her that they share a private fantasy about her, in which Alma lives on top of the Express Lifts tower and overlooks Northampton from a throne of human skulls. It’s an arresting image, and she’s beaming fondly as she waves goodbye to them. Before she’s reached the traffic lights two pretty girls who look like art students have smiled and nodded at her, she has made another three-year-old look haunted and another cab has chirped its horn as it purrs by, prompting another clueless raising of the silver talons and another jingling rattle of the finger-armor. She reflects that she is fortunate to have been blessed by an inflated self-image since infancy. Anyone else subjected to this much attention would most probably start acting strangely, she concludes while searching for a kabbalistic insight in the sequence of red-amber-green.

Her personality is a long-running radio drama that is broadcast chiefly for her own amusement, much as she suspects is true of many people. Obviously some prefer personas that are tuned into light comedy, while judged by their expressions the few individuals waiting at the lights with her have modeled their essential natures on the weather forecast. Or perhaps Religious Affairs, Alma reasons after a consideration of the Deco edifice that looms behind her while she stands there by the crossing. Opened in the 1930s as the Savoy Cinema and operating as the ABC throughout her back-row dating years, hosting the Beatles once, the place is now among the growing number of town properties owned by the Jesus Army, an expanding horde of sometimes-strident evangelicals that had begun recruiting from Northampton’s pool of derelicts or drunks back in the early 1970s, whisking them from park benches off to Army headquarters in nearby Bugbrook. She recalls an incident from a few years ago when the group had been censured after traumatizing children with an unannounced alfresco reenactment of the Crucifixion, but apart from that they seemed to be permitted to do what they wanted, pretty much.

Alma is unsurprised by this. The town has been a thriving hotbed of religious nutjobs since the fourteen-hundreds, many of whom Alma feels a certain retroactive fondness for. She likes the poetry, she likes the attitude, the heresy and anarchy that sought to brush aside the King and clergy, sought to recreate society as an egalitarian domain of ranting tinkers, mechanic philosophers, a whole Nation of Saints that answered to no temporal authority but only to a moral vision, to an enflamed state of mind, a level of both spiritual and political awareness that would be Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. She likes the Lollards and the Ranters and the Muggletonians. She likes the incendiary ravings of the founding Quakers, likes imagining that nice man on the oat-box tearing off his clothes and screaming for the violent overthrow of monarchy. She’s even partial to Moravians, albeit mainly for their freak-show value with that mental business about penetrating the messiah in his spear-hole and their influence on her enduring idol William Blake, but Alma doesn’t like the Jesus Army very much. She finds herself suspicious of religious zeal that has a business plan.

The lights change and she crosses to an intermediary island in the middle of York Road. Alma reflects that she is standing on the spot that Doug McGeary’s vegetable truck had rumbled over nearly fifty years before, transporting her unbreathing brother to the hospital. She realizes that today Doug’s mercy-dash would have to take a different route, with it no longer being possible to sail down from the Mounts into York Road. He would have had to turn left at the cinema, circle the Unitarian Church and come back at the square the other way, adding some very-likely fatal minutes to his journey. Mind you, by all rights her brother should have been a goner when the truck was still halfway up Grafton Street, so perhaps the diversion wouldn’t have made that much of a difference.

Finally she squeezes past the barrier railings at the top of the pedestrian precinct and is in Abington Street, or at least in what’s left of it. Back a few hundred years ago this was the town’s east gate, called the St. Edmund’s End after the since-demolished church across the Wellingborough Road from the converted workhouse in which Alma had drawn her first breath, to voice the first of many furious and unreasonable complaints. Daniel Defoe, writing his guide to English towns, described Northampton as essentially a crossroads, with its north-south axis running along Sheep Street, down the Drapery and into Bridge Street while its east-west axis traced a line through Abington Street, Gold Street and Marefair towards the ruins of the castle. By pedestrianizing one end of this east-west passage, the town council have effectively stitched up a major vein, inviting gangrene. She can see it setting in already, read its symptoms in the plasterboarded windows and the bloom of estate agent shingles. There’s no passing trade and the shop rents are all ridiculously high. If this persists, Alma predicts, the town will turn into an economic crater where the money only circulates around the rim, through retail parks and giant chain-stores, while the center is abandoned to the tumbleweed of repossession notices, transformed into an after-dark arena, to a Walter Hill set with more vomit, more teenagers lying in their own piss, and more incoherent war-cries. Incoherent wars. You know it’s a bad sign when you see bunches of commemorative flowers taped to lamps on the pink paving, with no road in sight.

Pigeons rise fluttering around her, blissfully oblivious to the mean-spirited poster pasted on a rubbish bin which states that feeding them is a variety of littering and therefore punishable by a fine. It isn’t that she thinks this will make any difference to the birds themselves, who after all can’t read and don’t depend on handouts from animal-lovers to sustain them in the first place, but she feels indignant at the sentiments expressed. What in the name of fuck is wrong with pigeons? If the council were attempting to discourage wasps, attack dogs or the Jesus Army she could see some sense in the campaign, but pigeons? With that green and violet shimmering on the ruff; that wobbling and fluffed-up coo? If the municipal authorities think getting rid of pigeons is their number one priority for the apparently-condemned town center, then why don’t they just plant landmines on all of the window sills and get it over with instead of sticking up their pissy little threatening notices?

She carries on down Abington Street. There are very few other pedestrians but she is wading through a crowd of ghosts and memories, her killer robot hands deep in her jacket pockets like a 1950s badboy, Jimmy Dean after the menopause. She skirts around the dopey Francis Crick memorial erected in the center of the thoroughfare, a piece of kitsch with silvery double-helix twists supporting what appear to be a pair of nudist superheroes, sexless manikins whose bald and featureless Barbie pudendas clearly won’t be passing on inherited genetic traits to anyone. Besides, the only thing connecting Abington Street with the local scientific pioneer is the conspicuous DNA evidence to be found following an average Friday night. Of course, the monument might be a comment on local inbreeding, with the figures diving upwards in a desperate spiral to escape a tiny, stagnant gene-pool, more of a gene-puddle if the truth be told. Alma recalls the rumor of an entire cyclops-village somewhere out near Towcester, full of cyclops postmen, cyclops publicans and cyclops toddlers, then remembers it was her that started it.

By curving round the structure to her left she is now walking down beside the library, the only building in the street that hasn’t changed since Alma was a little girl. She’d joined up at the age of five and visited the library several times a fortnight for the next ten years, mostly for ghost-stories and yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz science-fiction. She’d had haunting, memorable dreams about the institution as a child, walking through winding corridors of wooden shelving with impossible and fascinating tomes propped up to every side, books that you couldn’t read because the words would crawl around upon the page if they were opened. Her dream-library had padded flooring covered in red vinyl like a bar stool or a car-seat into which were set round holes that were most probably vaginal, so that the book-browsing clientele could climb from floor to floor.

The actual waking library had been almost as marvelous in its interior – the tiny section like an open wardrobe that hummed with the aura of the books on séances and mesmerism that were kept there – and from the outside it was still beautiful, the busts of benefactors set into the honey-colored stone. Alma likes showing visiting Americans the library, just so she can point to the carven likeness at the upper right of its façade and ask them who they think it is. They generally assume that it’s George Washington, an English gesture of respect for their first president, seeming bewildered when informed that it is in fact Andrew, George’s older relative, back from before the Washingtons left Barton Sulgrave for America when the New Model Army were converging on Northamptonshire during the sixteen-hundreds. The family, reputedly, had even pinched the village crest of bars and mullets to provide a basis for the starry, stripy flag of their adopted home. To be quite frank, the only Washingtons she unreservedly respects are Dinah, Booker T. and Geno, whom she feels at least gave something back.

She’s just about to cross the precinct to the Co-op Bank on its far side when she becomes aware of an unusually solid-looking ghost from bygone times approaching from the opposite direction, walking up past the dilapidated mouth of the former Co-op Arcade. Dragging her hair back from the soot-ringed blast-sites of her eyes to take a closer look, she realizes that the only thing which marks the figure as a ghost is the anachronistic clothing it affects: the pinstripe shirt, the neckerchief and waistcoat. With her spirits lifting out of their default disgruntlement, she recognizes the bucolic specter as perhaps her oldest mate, Benedict Perrit. Ah, Northampton. Just when you’ve decided that the planners have clubbed her into insensibility, she throws you a bouquet.

The moment Benedict sees Alma, he goes into one of his routines. First the appalled look, then the turning round and going back the way he’s come as if pretending that he hasn’t seen her, then another sharp reverse to bring him back in her direction, only this time quivering with silent giggles. Good old Ben, mad as a Chinese situation comedy, the only one among Alma’s associates and former classmates to consistently out-strange her without even trying, and one of the few artists or poets from her teenage years who didn’t jack it all in for a comfortable life when they hit twenty-five. Anything but. Benedict’s face is creased with lines of verse and looks like it resulted from an ill-judged one-night stand between the masks of comedy and tragedy. He has been killed by poetry, and at the same time poetry is all that saves him and redeems him. Good old Ben.

He sticks one paw out for a handshake, but she’s much too pleased to see him and she isn’t having it. Dodging around the proffered hand she plants her bloody lips upon his cheek and scoops him up into a python hug. Sooner or later he’ll breathe out, which will allow her to constrict him further and then when he loses consciousness she’ll dislocate her jaw and swallow him. Before she can accomplish this he flinches back out of her grip, frantically wiping at the Girl-Ebola she has left smeared on his chops.

“Get off! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!”

His laugh is that of Tommy Cooper, left marooned upon a desert island until it has morphed into the seagull-scaring cackle of Ben Gunn. Delighted, Alma tells him he’s a suave Lothario and asks him if he’s writing these days. When he tells her he’s still scribbling, she remarks on reading “Clearance Area” a day or two ago and lets him know what a good poem she thinks it is. He looks at her uncertainly, unsure if she is being genuine.

“I weren’t bad, was I? Ah ha ha.”

The use of the past tense and subtle shift of subject from the poem to its author registers as a small blip on Alma’s radar of concern. It doesn’t sound good, like a clichéd western gunslinger retired to the saloon, fondly remembering his cordite-scented triumphs through a haze of redeye. What a load of shit. She sternly reassures him that he’d been considerably better than “not bad”, then, realizing that she too has used the past tense, she attempts to rectify her blunder by just coming out and telling him without condition that he’s a good writer, whereupon he taps her up for a few quid.

This startles her, even as she is fumbling automatically in her jeans’ pocket for a piece of crumpled paper that won’t turn out to be an old till receipt from Morrison’s. Alma has gladly dished out cash to the town’s homeless ever since they blossomed in shop doorways during the late ’Eighties, and especially since it became official policy that this was just “encouraging the beggars”. Having come from a community of beggars, this only spurs on her bloody-minded generosity, much the same way that she’s been idly planning to strew crumbled blueberry muffins up and down the precinct ever since she spotted that annoying pigeon notice at the street’s top end. A friend, like Benedict, is always welcome to some spare cash if she has it, but as she presses a note into his palm she’s more concerned about the shift in self-esteem that seems to have befallen him since the last time they met. Taken along with the “I weren’t bad, was I?” comment, Alma’s feeling a bit worried for him. Making matters worse, he’s looking guilty now about taking the money, which she brashly brushes over by assuring him she’s “fucking loaded”, anxious to get on to safer ground. The moment passes. Alma asks him to tomorrow’s exhibition, not expecting him to come, and when they’re saying goodbye some few minutes later Benedict is telling her that he’s a Cyberman and Alma’s laughing like a drain. Everything’s good again.

Waving farewell while still snickering down her nose at intervals, she wanders a few paces further down the street and then remembers that she had originally been heading for the bank, correcting her trajectory accordingly. She’s thinking about Benedict, about how one of the most blazing and important moments in her life had been provoked by Ben’s inspiring idiocy. They were both something like ten or eleven and had worked out an ingenious way to climb up to the rooftops of the copper warehouse which stood on the corner that connected Freeschool Street with Green Street. This ascent, which obviously needed to be made at night, had first required a trip to Narrow-Toe Lane, just around the block, where they could wriggle on their bellies underneath the locked gate of a builder’s yard. Here they had clambered up a borrowed ladder onto a rear wall of the adjacent Perrit property and scampered giggling along the ridge of Benedict’s dad’s woodpile in the starlight. This eventually allowed them access to the warehouse outbuildings, from whence it was an easy scramble up to the slate roofs and chimneypots above.

For months it had been their precarious kingdom, only shared with cats and birds. Dangerous games of chase evolved to suit the slanted planes of the new landscape, but these had their limits: dead-end precipices that the two kids couldn’t find the nerve to overcome. The worst of these was at the far end of a guttering, a rain channel between the slope of one roof and the upright wall that was the boundary of the next. Their chases would end prematurely at this point, night after night, because of the sheer drop into a narrow alley filled with metal scrap and probable impalement that plunged down into the dark immediately beyond. The threatening passage had been only four or five feet wide and had the angled tiles of a one-story storage shed on its far side. If it had been a jump between two chalk marks in a sunny playground they’d have made it without hesitation, but to try the same thing on a rooftop in pitch darkness with an abyss full of tetanus junk beneath you was a very different matter.

Then, one moonlit evening, Benedict had upped his game. Alma was chasing him across the blue-gray hills some thirty feet above the street, pursuing him with an unsettling degree of relish through a Caligari world of chimneys, tilts, and shadows. Benedict, only a few paces ahead of her, was giggling with terror that was wholly justified and understandable: most people would get through their lives without being pursued across the skyline by a predatory Alma Warren anywhere save in unusually vivid nightmares, while for Benedict this had been his unenviable reality. Upon the night in question she had herded him into the dead-end fold between the rooftops, knowing that she had him trapped and slavering triumphantly as she moved in upon her shrill and tittering quarry for the kill. It was at this point that Ben’s fear of being caught by Alma had at last outweighed his squeamishness regarding getting speared by shards of glass or rusty railings in the alleyway below. Benedict jumped, shrieking with fear and somehow laughing at the same time, hurtling across the lethal gap to land upon the shed roof, five or six feet lower down on its far side.

Alma, still running at full tilt behind him, had just seconds to decide that she preferred the possibility of gory death at age eleven to the utter certainty of someone beating her at something. Having made her mind up, when she reached the edge she just kept going.

In the fraction of a second during which she hung in empty space above the snarl of rusted implements and broken windows down below, Alma had been illuminated. As the instant stretched itself, she realized that she’d accidentally jumped free of all her fears and limitations, fears of injury and death and ruin. Trusting only to the moment she’d propelled herself past doubt and gravity and in that moment had known with abiding certainty that there was nothing she was scared of, nothing that she couldn’t do.

Even as an eleven-year-old girl she had, of course, been both considerably bigger and much heavier than Benedict. She sailed across the treacherous alleyway to land on the shed roof beside him and immediately went through it, shattering its slates and ending up embedded in its gradient to her scabby knees. Oh, how they’d laughed, exhilarated and hysterical, once they’d checked to make sure that nobody had lost an eye. The incident had given Alma an important insight into overcoming psychological impediments, which she’d experimented further with. Having a morbid dread of drowning, as a twelve-year-old she’d swum out to the steel partition that divided one end of Midsummer Meadow’s lido from the other and had dived down to one of the railed vents that were some feet underwater. She had pushed her arm between the bars then turned it round so that she wasn’t certain she could pull it out again. For perhaps thirty long and awesome seconds she had floated at the still heart of her wholly self-inflicted terror, trying to absorb and understand it, and then she had calmly turned her arm the right way round to pull it from between the bars and strike back for the glittering surface. Alma smiles now at the memory as she enters the bank. The critics and sometimes admirers who describe her as eccentric really haven’t got the first idea.

She knows all the bank staff by name, the Co-op having been her bank of choice for the last twenty years. She’d started with them solely on the basis of their ethical investment policies, but as the decades had ticked past on her milometer she’d come to notice that whenever there was a financial meltdown caused by banking improprieties, the Co-op’s frankly boring logo never featured in the cascade of shamed high-street brands that poured across the teatime news-screens. In the dizzying casino spin of a roulette economy, inside a threadbare circus tent stuffed with adrenaline-deranged rogue traders, oligarchs, and corporate bosses living beyond anybody’s means, the Co-op stood fast. Despite its refusal to invest resources with arms manufacturers, the bank stuck to its guns. Also, when Alma’s mom Doreen had died in 1995 they’d sent a big bouquet of flowers with personal messages from everybody at the branch. As far as Alma is concerned, they could be caught providing orphan baby seals for Rio Tinto Zinc to use as sex-slaves after that, and she’d most probably turn her blind eye.

After she’s said hello to everyone, Alma inspects herself on the closed circuit television while she waits in line. The camera is over by the Abington Street entrance several yards behind her, and so only gives a rearview long-shot of the leather-jacketed old woman with the hanging-gardens hairstyle, a good head and shoulders taller than the other people in the queue. This is the nearest that she ever gets to an objective image of herself and finds she doesn’t like it very much. It makes her feel obscurely isolated, and besides, she doesn’t see herself like that. She sees herself as bigger and a great deal nearer. And not from behind.

She checks her balance and draws out a random wad of cash to stuff in the side-pocket of her jeans. Just yesterday she’d had a chat with the incorrigible serial-sympathizer and unlikely innocent Melinda Gebbie, her best mate from Semilong. The other woman artist had remarked on how she always liked to have some reassuring totem in her pocket, useful Kleenex tissues, dead bees or particularly pretty leaves that she’d picked up. Alma had thought about it for a while and then said “Yeah, well, see, for me that would be money.” While she’s probably lost several high-denomination notes across the years she still resists the idea of a purse or handbag, reasoning that this would only be a good way to lose everything at once. She thinks it highly probable that she’d eventually leave the handbag in a café, whereas it’s unlikely that she’d leave her trousers. Not out of the question, but unlikely.

Exiting the bank she nips next door into the premises of Martin’s, the newsagents, so that she can stock up on essentials: Rizla papers, fags, Swan matches, magazines. She pulls the latest issues of New Scientist and Private Eye down from their upper shelves, wondering if their placement might be part of an entirely sensible campaign to make sure that only the tall receive appropriate intellectual stimulation. One day soon, when she and her kind have grown smart enough to formulate a foolproof plan, then Stephen Fry will give the signal and they’ll all rise up and massacre the short-ass numskulls in their beds. Something like that, at any rate. Let a girl have her daydreams.

Alma takes the two mags to the till where genial, bullet-headed Tony Martin and long-suffering wife Shirley have already got her forty Silk Cut Silver, five packs of green Rizla papers and two boxes of Swan matches waiting for her. Tony shakes his shaved dome ruefully while ringing up the Rizlas.

“Alma, honestly! All o’ these Rizla papers! Surely you must ‘ave got that scale model of the Eiffel Tower completed ages ago? What’s the matter with yer?”

Shirley looks up from re-stocking shelves and tells her husband to shut up and not to be so rude, but Alma’s grinning.

“Yeah, I did, but I got bored with it and started on a model of the Vatican. Now, are you going to ring those up, or shall I get my matchstick Pope to excommunicate you?”

It’s a running joke between them. Years ago someone who worked behind the counter had asked Alma why she bought so many Rizla papers, to which Alma had replied with a deadpan expression and without a beat that she was building a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of the flimsy, gum-edged leaves. While this had only been a gag she’d found it an appealing one, an idea she could get a bit of mileage out of. Well, more than a bit as it turned out. She sees ideas much as a farmer sees his pigs, and doesn’t even want to waste the squeal if she can help it.

With her purchases inside a flimsy plastic carrier-bag, the national flower, she waves a clattering metallic goodbye to the Martins and steps back out of the shop into the wide pink precinct. She continues her descent of Abington Street, calling in at Marks & Spencer’s to pick up some bits and pieces for her evening meal: a couple of long demon-tongue Ramiros peppers, cranberry and orange stuffing, and some feta cheese. She navigates a designated path between the open-plan departments, overlooked by Myleene Klass and a still-lovely Twiggy. Alma never feels entirely comfortable in the conspicuously poncey store, but, having recently boycotted Sainsbury’s, lacks for a convenient alternative.

The Sainsbury’s episode still makes her smile, though it’s the ghastly smile of something that one really should have killed but only wounded. She had been emerging from the Grosvenor Center branch of Sainsbury’s, where she knew most of the ladies at the tills by name, laden down by two bulging store-brand bags-for-life filled with her purchases. A uniformed security guard, shrewdly noticing the lizard-green-with-watermelon-pink-interior hoodie that she happened to be wearing, had deduced she was therefore a member of the underclass (which, emotionally at least, she was) and stepped to block her path, demanding to see Alma’s till receipt. Towering above the relatively pint-sized individual she had craned her neck, lowering her massive head to his eye-level as if talking to a woefully underachieving eight-year-old. Explaining that she wasn’t in the habit of collecting till receipts, Alma had asked if this was some new policy of random stop-and-search, or if he’d had some other reason for selecting her among the dozen or so more conventional-looking shoppers who were then emerging from the supermarket. Looking more and more uncertain by the moment, the guard had then pointlessly requested that she show him what was in her Sainsbury’s shopping bags, perhaps suspecting somehow that they’d prove to contain shopping that had come from Sainsbury’s.

She had repeated her inquiry, leaving an exaggerated gap between each word so that he had the time to fully comprehend one syllable before being required to struggle with the next. “Why … did … you … stop … me … specifically?” By this point other customers were nervously approaching and protesting Alma’s innocence, looking more worried for the clearly-new employee, understandably, than they were for the famously belligerent giantess. Attempting to salvage a sense of his authority in this deteriorating situation, the guard had said that Alma must keep her receipts. Alma had duly noted this new Sainsbury’s policy but had explained that since she wouldn’t be returning to the store, it wasn’t really going to affect her. Smiling anxiously as she’d begun to walk away, he’d called out a reminder to hang on to her receipt next time, which had made Alma pause, sigh heavily, and then explain in her best child-friendly voice what all the long words about not returning to the store in her last sentence were intended to convey. When she’d got home she’d rung customer services and told them it was Alma Warren calling, at which the young woman on the other end had chirpily informed her that she’d seen Alma on telly just the previous night. Alma had told her that was nice and then gone on to detail what had happened earlier, explaining that she could only interpret the guard’s scrutiny as being class-based and how this had prompted her decision to give Sainsbury’s a miss in future. She’d assured the perfectly-nice woman that she wasn’t asking Sainsbury’s for an apology, though anyone who knew her would have heard the implication that it was too late for such a useless trifle to placate her; that she was by now embarked upon a grudge that she would carry to the grave.

It hadn’t been the first time she’d attracted the attention of security in Sainsbury’s, although on the previous occasion she’d been in the company of her dear chum, the actor Robert Goodman, so she hadn’t really blamed them. Bob, blessed with what a desperate estate agent would call “distinctive features”, had during his various career played the Hamburglar, and the corpse-humping rapist solider in Luc Besson’s Joan of Arc, while in a number of advertisements for car alarms, alongside his appearances upon The Bill, Eastenders, and in Batman and A Fish Called Wanda, he had made the role of Second Scar-faced Thug his own. Given Bob’s murderous demeanor, she wasn’t surprised that they’d been followed round the store. If Alma didn’t know Bob personally, and if he wasn’t currently researching stuff on her behalf pertaining to tomorrow’s exhibition, then she’d have him taken out by snipers; would have more than likely done so long ago. This latest incident, however, had no such extenuating circumstances: she’d been stopped and questioned because she looked poor. In fucking Sainsbury’s, which Alma hadn’t realized was now such an elite concern. By contrast, here in poncey Marks & Spencer’s, the one guard who’d ever spoken to her had just smiled and said he was a fan. Class prejudice, apparently, is not seen as a major issue, possibly because its victims are traditionally inarticulate. Alma herself, of course, never shuts up, particularly when it comes to people of her background being demonized. She can drone on about the subject endlessly, most usually in the two or three media interviews she does each week, or some more permanent form. No, she won’t be needing an apology.

Back in Abington Street, burdened by two carrier bags now, she carries on towards the coffee shop down at the bottom, Caffè Nero. Why name a café after someone like Nero, Alma wonders? You might just as well call it Caffè Caligula or Caffè Heliogabalus. Or Caffè Mussolini for that matter. The caffeine of Europe.

The café stands roughly on the former site of the town hall, the intermediary model serving as a stepping stone between the first Gilhalda on the Mayorhold and the splendid current Guildhall round the corner in St. Giles Street. It was here on this spot almost ten years before that Alma had crossed paths with then-Prime-Minister-in-waiting Tony Blair, on a pre-landslide walkabout with suited Reservoir Dogs minders and the rictus grin and painted eyeballs of a ventriloquist’s dummy who’s determined not to go gack in the gox. The party had been sauntering down Abington Street just as Alma had been walking up, sunbathing in the awed attention they clearly imagined they were getting from the utterly oblivious passersby. You could tell that inside their minds they were parading down the recently pedestrianized precinct, all in flattering slow-motion with the faint breeze ruffling their jet-molded hair attractively.

Scanning the passing faces for a sign of something other than indifference, Blair’s eyes had eventually met Alma’s gray and yellow hazard lights. Of course, she hadn’t known at that point he was going to drag the country into an interminable and disastrous war, buddying up to the Americans with a view to his own retirement prospects, but she’d been aware of him for years and knew that he would almost certainly be doing something vile. She’d watched him and his party tacitly support repressive Tory legislation like Clause 28 or the Criminal Justice Bill. She’d watched him ‘modernize’ the Labor party by excising the last vestiges of the core values that her parents and grandparents had believed in; watched him sell the poor, the disinherited and even the trade unions who’d brought his party into being down the same endlessly rolling opportunist river. On the afternoon of her encounter with him, then, despite the fact he hadn’t been elected yet, she’d thought to get in her retaliation early. She hadn’t looked daggers at him, she’d looked Daisy-cutters, with a glare of such intensity that she would only normally employ it if she were attempting to blow up the moon. There had been fields once that had given Alma cause to look at them like that, where now there would be nothing growing for the next few hundred years. She’d held the contact long enough to make sure it had registered, waiting until Blair’s grin had frozen to a rictus and his startled eyes had undergone their first-to-see-the-creature moment before she had curled her lip and looked dismissively away, continuing with her ascent of Abington Street.

Entering the café now to grab a cup of hot black tea and slice of Tiramisu, she talks with the Polish girls behind the counter before relocating to a punch-drunk leather armchair by the window, still considering her brief encounter with the man who is at present hanging on to leadership with the desperate tenacity of a hand-chosen lobster clinging to the ornamental castle in the restaurant tank. This is the man who by his own account has felt the hand of history upon his shoulder with such dreary frequency across the years and yet has never realized that it’s fastening a label saying “stab me” to his back with Sellotape.

Levering up a forkful of her custard/coffee cake towards the tag team of bright red Mexican wrestlers that are her lips she thinks about the pair of local men, both former Labor Party members, who are currently confined by a restraining order which prevents them leaving England and forbids them talking to each other. One of them, a civil servant by the name of David Keogh who lives just off the Mounts, was a communications officer seconded to the Foreign Office during 2005. While thus employed, Keogh had received the transcript of a conversation between Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush in which the gangster and his moll had discussed the advisability of bombing noncombatant Arab television station Al-Jazeera. Understanding that this was a war-crime in the making, Keogh had panicked and passed on the information to his fellow Northamptonian and Labor Party chum, former political researcher Leo O’Connor, then employed as an assistant to Northampton South Labor MP and erstwhile Inter-City Firm football enthusiast Tony Clarke. Alma has always had a soft spot with regard to Clarke, who seems to her an honorable, decent man. To be fair, she supposes that unless he’d wanted to be in the frame himself as part of a conspiracy the MP would have had no choice but to do what he did upon discovery of the memo, which was putting in the call to Special Branch.

This has led to a minor quandary at the Foreign Office, detailed in the pages of a recent Private Eye. Apparently, while one department of that august body had been claiming that the Bush/Blair Al-Jazeera conversation never happened and was the malign invention of Keogh and O’Connor, a completely separate department had announced in its response to an inquiry on the case that although they possessed a transcript of the conversation, they could not release it. Alma wonders how they’ll charge the pair for breach of the Official Secrets Act without reminding everyone what the official secret under scrutiny had been. Her guess is that they’ll leave it a few months until some new catastrophe or scandal has eclipsed the matter and the overall amnesia of the general public has had time to kick in. Then they’ll rush the case through court with a D-Notice on the media, preventing press and television from giving details of the original offense in any coverage. That’s what she’d do if she were some pink-faced Magister Ludi in the depths of Whitehall.

Blotting mascarpone from the scarlet crime-scene of her lips, she feels indignant that this Kafka re-run should be happening to people from her town, one of them living on the Mounts just past the northeast corner of the Boroughs, her beloved neighborhood. Mansoul, it is the very seat of war.

She jingles goodbye to the Polish girls and exits Caffè Nero, crossing the vestigial tarmac stump of Abington Street that’s still hanging on past the pink paving, heading for the market square. Alma remembers she’d been going to pay her Council Tax, but realizes that she’s left the bill at home. Oh, well. Who cares? She’ll sort it out on Monday, when the preview exhibition’s over. Given how Northampton has responded to Poll Tax demands across the centuries, she doubts that her late payment will present much of a problem. After Margaret Thatcher overreached herself by introducing it back in the ’Eighties, bailiff’s wagons had been chased back to their depot by infuriated Eastern District tenants who’d gone on to wreck the repossession company’s business premises. A mob of protesters had taken over council offices, holding staff prisoner at fist-point in a day-long siege. Of course, all that was nothing to the fourteenth century when the first Poll Tax had been raised down at the castle at the south end of St. Andrew’s Road, precipitating upon that occasion the incendiary orgy that was the Peasant’s Revolt. No, they could wait until after the weekend and count themselves lucky that she wasn’t going to torch the Guildhall. Probably.

Walking in a diagonal across the market’s gentle gradient, stepping between the wooden posts of recently-vacated stalls or dodging under the perpetually wet-looking canopies, Alma is thinking still about Keogh and O’Connor, free will, Gerard ’t Hooft, Benedict Perrit and her rooftop leap across the scrap-filled chasm when she’d been eleven. She assumes that all the other people making their way back and forth across the square are similarly occupied with idiosyncratic matters of their own. This is reality, this teeming of illusions, memories, anxieties, ideas and speculations, constant in six billion minds. The actual events and circumstances of the world are just the sweaty and material tip of this immense and ghostly iceberg, the entirety of which no individual being can conceivably experience. For Alma, this raises the question of just whom or what reality is real to. You would have to postulate some hypothetic point of absolute omniscience outside the human world, some being constantly engrossed in knowing everything and therefore not having the time to act itself, a still and inert point of utter understanding, utter receptivity.

The nearest Alma can come to conceiving this sole motionless spectator of an ultimate reality is the stone angel that’s atop the Guildhall, somewhere to her rear as she strides up across the marketplace towards its northwest corner. The archangel Michael, hopelessly mixed up with Michael, patron saint of corporations, standing with his shield and snooker cue above the town, hearing its every thought yet never opening those birdshit-spattered lips to voice a warning or betray a confidence. Aware of several deaths and several hundred copulations every hour, knowing which of a hundred billion sperm will hit the mark, will end up as a nurse, a rapist, a social reformer or an accident statistic; end up going through divorce, a bankruptcy, a windscreen. Fully cognizant of every Starburst wrapper, every dog turd, every atom, every quark; knows if Gerard ’t Hooft’s equations of an underlying state beneath the charm and strangeness will turn out to be correct or not; knows if Benedict Perrit will be coming to her opening tomorrow. Every fact and fancy, everything reflected perfectly, exquisitely, upon the dull stone brow. This entire universe, including Alma and her current musings, caught in a synaptic shimmer of the gelid and impartial granite mind.

Halfway across the emptying market, it occurs to her that she is walking through the blossoming iron phantom of the monument, the empty spot where once it stood upon its stepped stone base. Perhaps she even transects an eight-year-old self sat risking piles on the cold pedestal, examining her knees where they extend beyond the pleated hem of her thin navy skirt. The vague, ungathered wool of memory that fills the square is spun into specific strands of yarn upon the monument’s ghost-spindle. Shiny, rain-licked cobbles emerge briefly through the pink replacement paving and the empty wooden outlines of each stall are colored in, filled with dead traders and their long-since perished merchandise. A trestle of unbranded sweets, cartoon confectionery even then unseen outside the pages of The Beano, all presided over by a man with heavy black Italian eyebrows and a starched white coat. The stand of comics and used paperbacks that she still sometimes dreams about, Sid’s, its proprietor in cap and gloves and muffler, breath and pipe-smoke hanging in the winter air and all around a gaudy flowerbed of Adventure Comics and Forbidden Worlds held down by flat, round iron paperweights, Mad magazine or True Adventure with its Nazi temptresses and whipped G.I.s, hanging from bulldog-clips along a spring-like wire connected to the bookstall’s upper reaches, just below the green-and-white stripes of its canopy. In the pre-Christmas dark the huddled pitches look like painted paper lanterns from above, the white glare of the storm lamps sieved through colored canvas. Glowing cigarette ends hover in the black. Magnificent and evanescent, the Emporium Arcade flares on her right, alight with toys and knitting patterns, before once again subsiding to a blank and stone-clad modern wall, the grand wrought-iron Victoriana of its entrance melting to a brutal concrete underpass where teenagers kicked an Albanian man to death a year or two ago.

As she is heading from the open corner of the marketplace towards the indeterminate point where the Drapery meets Sheep Street, Alma glances downhill to her left and notices the Halifax Building Society’s confident frontage on the corner of Drum Lane. Caught in the floss of other times, Alma can still see Alfred Preedy’s paper shop that occupied the premises forty or fifty years before, the place she’d had the dream about when she was five, the hooded foreman and his midnight crew of carpenters that she’d attempted to describe with Work in Progress. Was the job completed to its schedule, or is it still going on, she wonders, somewhere in the dreams of children? A fragmentary idea comes to her, something about the planed wooden boards of the nocturnal workers representing lengths of time or sets of linked events, with every human life a nail, her and her brother Warry, Tony Blair, Keogh and O’Connor, everyone she knows and everyone she doesn’t know, hammered into being by their parents’ coital rhythms, bang, bang, bang, immovably embedded in the hard grain of eternity, so that –

Her train of thought is interrupted by a genial young fellow in a baseball cap and trainers that are better-looking than her own. All that he wants to do is shake her hand and tell her that her work’s amazing while apologizing for approaching her, which makes her feel all warm and motherly. Just as she’s saying goodbye to him, one of the remaining traders on the market square behind her calls out, “Me too! Well done, Alma!” giving her a brief round of applause. She beams and waves. Sometimes this is all like a dream, too pleasant, a reality suspiciously benevolent to Alma Warren. There are times when she suspects it’s all some ludicrously vain and self-regarding compensatory fantasy she’s dreaming in some other, less auspicious life. Perhaps she’s really sitting, heavily sedated, in a pool of her own piss at an asylum somewhere, or maybe she’s in a coma in the 1970s after she drank so much that she stopped breathing at her twentieth birthday party. It occurs to her that her unusually enjoyable existence might be some hallucination happening in the stretched-out instant of her death, a vision of the life she might have had. Who knows? Perhaps she never really cleared that alley full of rusted junk, back when she was eleven.

She passes between the Abbey National’s Drapery Branch and the majestic colonnaded front of the old Corn Exchange, its chiseled steps ascending into what had once been the town’s other major cinema, called variously the Gaumont and the Odeon. Here she’d been forced to watch The Sound of Music three times with her mom Doreen, which she considered to be technically a form of child abuse. She’d been stood up twice, waiting on the cold steps for some acne-stippled tossrag who’d quite evidently only asked her out when dared to by his mates. She’d also come here several years before her teenage trials, when she had been a member of the Gaumont Boys and Girls club. Every Saturday they’d be let in for sixpence and would then be led by an enthusiastic adult, Uncle Something, in the singing of peculiar old songs like “Clementine”, “The British Grenadiers” or “Men of Harlech in the Hollow” before they were allowed to watch a short cartoon, a Children’s Film Foundation main show that would frequently involve an island, schoolboys and a foreign saboteur, then finally one episode from an ongoing eight-week serial, King of the Rocket Men or an old black-and-white Batman and Robin where the couple drove around in a completely ordinary 1940s car and Robin pushed his cardboard mask up on his forehead while conversing with his costumed pal in public. The main entertainment had been crawling under people’s legs along the rows of seats, or deftly flicking an ice-lolly stick to maybe blind a seven-year-old stranger several rows in front.

These days, of course, the building is another theme pub, a Hard Rock Café, and the town’s major cinema is a bog-standard multiplex at Sixfields, out past Jimmy’s End and a car-ride away. There’s almost a conceptualist brilliance to it all: turn all the cinemas to pubs, get everybody ruinously pissed and then make sure that there’s no outlet for the spasms of imagination, fury or libido, nothing to drain off the clumsy fantasies that bob up to the surface of a seventh pint of Wifebeater. The simple-minded plotlines, absent motivation and pointless momentum of the canceled celluloid will back up and spill out into the Saturday night streets. Before long you’ll have fascinating pieces of pure verité on every corner, budget Tarantino stabbings with assailants who hold their knives sideways and debate pop-culture trivia while giving you a Chelsea smile. The Oscars will be going to a flock of scattering shadows on CCTV.

Alma lopes across the woolly, shitty ass of Sheep Street to the gated entrance of the old fish-market, which she notices with some surprise is open. The big covered hall with its glass roof and glistening white slabs is part of Alma’s childhood landscape that she thought had been railed off forever. Vanished voices ringing from the wet tiles with an echo like a swimming-baths, and her naan May parting the crowds as she rolled through them like a black iron wrecking ball, lifting a liver-spotted hand and calling out to the fishmongers, all of whom she knew by name. The only one that Alma can remember is Three-Fingered Tunk, presumably so-called in order to distinguish him from all the other men called Tunk who had a different number of remaining digits.

She vaguely remembers hearing something about plans to turn the Fish Market into some sort of exhibition space or gallery, but has dismissed the idea as too fanciful. Not in Northampton; not in this world. It would never happen. The idea that she might have been wrong in her appraisal has, as usual, not occurred to her, which is perhaps why seeing the green metal concertina gates standing unlocked and open seems at first unreal. Feeling as if she’s stepping over the tiled threshold of a private dreamtime, Alma and her carrier-bags cross into the white emptiness of the interior.

The daylight falling through the dusty lens of the glass ceiling is diffused and milky, which transmutes the space into that of a realist painting. There are hardly any other figures to be seen about the echoing expanse, as dream-like and deserted as the streets in eighteenth-century prints. It’s early days yet, she supposes, with none of the promised art and fashion outlets up and running, but the church-like volume of the place impresses her. She’s never previously seen the Fish Market like this, denuded of its mumbling crowds, stripped of its cheery traders calling imprecations into the salt echo.

Now the slabs are bare and bloodless. The establishment is pared back to the bone, the trappings of its recent history sluiced away. Leftover shreds of topaz haddock, the prismatic gutter-silt of scales and staring collar-button eyes, swept off to join the horse-brasses and tankards of the Red Lion Inn that previously occupied this spot; join the menorahs and yarmulkes from the synagogue of a few centuries before. Its past removed, the market is a fertile vacuum waiting to be filled with future, a mysterious quantum void that hums with immanence and possibility. Alma is disconcerted by a sudden surge of hope, a cynicism override. Part of her is gloomily certain that the council will find some way to undo or undermine the venture, probably through sheer indifference rather than hostility, but the mere fact of its existence is a cause for optimism. It suggests to her that there are people in Northampton, people in the country, people in the world who have the will to make things be a different way. It’s the same feeling that she gets when she’s around her rapper buddies with their Boroughs-esoteric stage names: Influence, St. Craze, Har-Q, Illuzion. It’s the sense of social transformation that she sees, at least potentially, in art and occultism, even sometimes on the ragged Roman Thompson fringe of politics. This passionate desire to change reality into a domain more amenable to human beings, this is the ethereal fire that Alma can feel hanging in the brisk Fish Market air.

As if brought into being by her lifted spirits, one of the few blurred forms in Alma’s myopic middle-distance suddenly resolves itself on her approach into the unassuming and yet inspirational semblance of Knocker Wood, one of the greatest local antidotes for cynicism since the passing of the sorely-missed lyric barrage-balloon that was the late Tom Hall. Knocker – Alma had known him since they were both teenage hippies without ever learning his first name – had been achingly pretty as a young man, with his long black hair and the wild glitter in his eye that looked like poetry but turned out to be heroin. One of the town’s first junkies, Knocker had been part of that mysterious slapstick coterie who took part in their own Narco-Olympics every other Saturday, competitors in the 400-meter dash with stolen television set, haring along the Drapery to the cheers of the flowered-up bohemians gathered on the steps of All Saints Church.

Then everybody had got older. The majority of the long-haired spectators on the steps had straightened up and bailed out of the ailing freak-scene upon turning twenty, getting proper jobs and living up to parents’ expectations. This had left only the working-class contingent of the counter culture, who remained committed largely because they had nowhere else to go, and the addicted casualties like Knocker Wood for whom commitment was no longer the real issue. Knocker’s middle years had been a horror film, willfully gothic in the way that only junkies can aspire to. Alma can remember scabby ghouls who held up their collapsing veins with safety-pins, a pre-punk gesture, or who’d ruefully announce that they were “forced” to shoot up in their eyeball or their cock.

While Knocker hadn’t been among this self-consciously morbid set, for long years he had been a babbling mess that Alma is ashamed to say she’d crossed the street in order to avoid on numerous occasions. He’d lost his wife to an overdose, their daughter to a strain of hepatitis, devastating blows that methadone and Carlsberg Special Brew could not completely muffle. He’d been on a hell-bound train that overshot its destination and plowed on relentlessly for somewhere even worse when by some miracle he’d managed to leap off the footplate, tumbling helplessly down the embankment towards hard and cold sobriety. No-one had thought that he could do it. Nobody had seen it done before. Knocker had somehow managed to rebirth himself as a hill-walking rural rambler, a drink-and-drug-free boulevardier, a vision of redemption that these days Alma will happily cross several busy motorways to say hello to.

“Knocker! Good to see you. How’s it going?”

He’s still a good-looking man, beginning to bleach out attractively, worn smooth with age, but the stone-washed demeanor suits him to a T. The short gray hair is in retreat, daily conceding territory to the forehead, while his eyes are still as bright though clear now and engaging fully with the diamond world around him. He’s a soothing, peaceful sight, like clean blue pebbles in a stream. He beams and says hello to her, submitting to a hug and genuinely pleased to see her here; pleased to see every dust-mote spinning and illuminated in its Brownian waltz.

He tells her that he’s now a counselor, bringing his own experience to bear on mending others, beating out the world’s dents where he can. Alma sees him as one of Bunyan’s “mechanick philosophers”, dispensing healing words among the other tinkers, a one-man Nation of Saints without the Christianity and bloody pikestaffs. She is overjoyed to hear about his new line of employment, as pleased for herself as she is thrilled for him. Knocker is an important, vital totem in the way that Alma sees the world, proof positive that even in the blackest and most hopeless circumstances things can sometimes turn out wonderful.

She tells him about tomorrow’s exhibition, which he says he’ll try to get to, and then they discuss the transformed Fish Market, its tundra whiteness stretching all about them. Knocker’s eyes light up and flash the way they used to do, though now it’s the anticipatory pre-Christmas sparkle of a child rather than the mad hypodermic glint of yore.

“Yeah, they say they’ll be having costume balls here and events and things, as well as exhibitions. I think it sounds great. Northampton’s never really had a place like this.”

About to launch into her usual expectation-lowering list of reasons why it isn’t going to work, Alma remembers who she’s talking to and brings herself up short. If Knocker Wood can be so bravely optimistic about the Fish Market’s prospects, then it’s somehow craven for her to indulge in comfy pessimism. She should step up to the mark, and not be such a whining bitch.

“You’re right. I like the light here, and I like the atmosphere. It could be really, really good. It’d be nice to see this place filled up again with crowds of people, all in fancy dress. It’d be like the dreams you have when you’re a kid.”

They talk for a few minutes longer, then they hug goodbye and carry on their individual trajectories. As Alma leaves the market, pushing open the glass swing door at its rear and stepping out into the muddled area at the top of Silver Street, she feels elated both by the encounter and the prospects for her little art-show of the following day. Perhaps her pictures can do what she wants them to. Perhaps they can live up to her unreasonable demands and do something to salve the wounded Boroughs, if it’s only by drawing the right kind of attention to the place. At very least she’ll have discharged the obligations that she’d taken on after her brother’s afterlife experience, and laid some ghosts to rest for both of them, possibly literally. That isn’t bad for a year’s work.

Alma’s descent of the wide road that narrow Silver Street became during the 1970s is her descent into the past, into the Boroughs, and inevitably the cheap pre-war scent of the locale’s charisma wells up to surround her, coloring her thoughts and her perceptions. This is the paved-over ground she grew between the cracks of. This is where whatever vision she possesses came from, these thin lanes that trickle downhill to St. Andrew’s Road like dirty bathwater. Across the busy road the Multi-story car park squats upon two or three vanished streets and a few hundred hours of Alma’s childhood: the Electric Light Working Men’s Club in Bearward Street where she’d go with her parents and her brother on a Sunday night, the Judo club in Silver Street where she’d learned self-defense until she’d realized that she was too big and unpredictable for anyone to pick on. All the memories are crushed beneath the vast weight of the car park and compressed to a prismatic form of anthracite, a fuel that she’s been running on for more than fifty years.

The view from this point, high upon the area’s eastern slopes, has stayed essentially unchanged for all that time, if by ‘essentially’ you mean that the fleeced sky is in the same place and the angle of the sweeping incline remains constant. Nearly every other feature of the landscape has been altered or removed. The recently refurbished NEWLIFE buildings dominate the stepped-on vista, the surrounding circuit board of flats and maisonettes, communal cubes that have replaced the terraces of individual homes. Though greatly simplified, the neighborhood’s original main thoroughfares are visible in their archaic tangle, Bath Street, Scarletwell, Spring Lane. Some patches of the panorama are dispirited and overcast while others briefly glory in their sudden spotlight as the afternoon sun pours down through a threadbare sheet of cloud. The graduations of the distance appear much the same as ever, or at least they do to Alma’s blurring eyesight. She sees bands of brick or concrete housing giving way to stripes of railway track with overhead wires, and then finally resolving to the gray-green smolder of Victoria Park in the far west. Despite the shabby overlay of the last half-a-century, she knows the golden template of the district is still there somewhere. The buried heart still beats under the rubble. Forking off from Silver Street into the incline of an underpass below the roaring Mayorhold, Alma draws in a deep breath and ducks her head beneath the mottled surface of the present.

She emerges from the tunnel’s orange murk onto a sunken walkway lined with thirty-year-old tiling that suggests to Alma a bulimic Mondrian after a Spanish omelet. Turning left she climbs the ramp towards Horsemarket (West) and makes her way down into the bollard-occluded mouth of Bath Street, past the Kingdom Life building that was erected as a Boy’s Brigade Hall in the 60s. Alma’s brother had belonged to that peculiar Baptist paramilitary, the Baden-Powell Youth. He had marched with them and their cacophonous percussion-heavy band on Sunday mornings, an eleven-year-old with a brass badge and a lanyard, with a jaunty cadet cap atop his girly golden curls, a happiness and innocence in his blue eyes that Alma thought looked borderline subnormal. He’d have made a perfect pediatric Nazi if he could have carried off a decent goose-step without skipping like a cartoon milkmaid. Alma’s fairly certain he attended the odd torchlight rally at the pebble-dashed pavilion across the way, him and his mates all chanting “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Be Prepared” or whatever their motto was.

She idly wonders if the former Boy’s Brigade Headquarters is located near where Moseley’s Blackshirts had their offices back in the ‘30s. This provokes a trailing strand of thought relating to an article by Roman Thompson, which the grizzled lefty veteran had photocopied for her, all about the B.U.F.’s activities around the Mayorhold. There’d been grainy reproductions from newspaper photographs of leading local fascists posing with Sir Oswald while he toured the provinces, with one name in the captions underneath the pictures whited out, presumably by somebody in the archive department. Roman hadn’t noticed the deletion and had no clue as to what the missing name might be, though Alma had heard unsubstantiated rumors about Mr. Bassett-Lowkes, the erstwhile local footwear manufacturer and former owner of a house in Derngate with interiors by Rennie Mackintosh. Who knows? If World War Two had gone a different way he might have launched a line of sporty jack-brogues to commemorate the Führer’s victory.

Alma carries on down Bath Street with the corned beef-colored Moseley-vintage flat-blocks on her left, the NEWLIFE towers and their attendant modern terraced houses coming up on Alma’s right. Her inner musings still have a large National Socialist component, very like the winter scheduling on Channel Five. She’s heard, relatively recently, that Hitler’s planned invasion of the British Isles had ended with the capture of Northampton, as if once the center of the country had been taken then the rest was a foregone conclusion. Alma giggles to herself. Say what you like about the Third Reich, at least they recognized places of historical strategic import when they saw them. And the area has ended up with all the brutal and intimidating Nazi architecture anyway. Albert Speer might have stuck eagles and swastikas up on the tower-blocks, but would that necessarily have made the locals feel more subjugated and discouraged than the cheesy sideways silver lettering that’s up there currently? Quite frankly, either way the message would be much the same: tomorrow, most assuredly, does not belong to you.

The further down the hill she goes the more subdued and shadowy her mood becomes, as though Bath Street were an emotional gradient. She’s thinking about history’s celebrated victims, thinking of the holocaust, the blight of slavery, female suppression and the persecution of sexual minorities. She can recall her own Spare Rib days in the 1970s and how she’d briefly entertained the idea that a woman leader might make all the difference. This had obviously been back in the early seventies. Her point is that despite the very real continuing abuses born of anti-Semitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be. Every decade since society’s inception has been witness to a holocaust of paupers, so enormous and perpetual that it has become wallpaper, unnoticed, unreported. The mass graves at Dachau and at Auschwitz are, rightly, remembered and repeatedly deplored, but what about the one in Bunhill Fields that William Blake and his beloved Catherine were shoveled into? What about the one under the car park in Chalk Lane, across the road from Doddridge Church? What of the countless generations that have lived poor and have in one way or other died of that condition, uncommemorated and anonymous? Where are their fucking monuments and special ringed dates on the calendar? Where are their Spielberg films? Part of the problem is, no doubt, that poverty lacks a dramatic arc. From rags to rags to rags to rags to dust has never been an Oscar-winning formula.

Across the street a door opens in Simons Walk, one of the modern terraces that crouch beneath the high-rise buildings, and a fat bloke with a shaven head and internet-porn eyes emerges. He looks flatly and dismissively at Alma and quite blatantly hits the ‘Delete’ key on his Wank Bank before lumbering off along the walkway, probably towards the chip shop in St. Andrew’s Street. Alma lets her attention linger for a moment on the tree-walled ‘pocket park’ that’s just over the road, one of the only genuinely nice additions to the neighborhood. She’s got an artist friend called Claire who lives down here in Bath Street flats and makes a point of keeping the small green enclosure litter-free and weeded. Claire had painted an intensely-felt cartoon depiction of her threatened acre with carnivorous tower blocks encroaching on it from all sides which she’d insisted upon giving Alma after Alma fell in love with it, refusing any money and deeply embarrassing the nouveau-riche celebrity, who is forever in her fellow artist’s debt. Claire’s brave and lovely and a bit bipolar. She makes Alma smile just thinking of her, with a psilocybin mushroom and the legend ‘MAGIC’ tattooed on one forearm; ‘FUCK OFF’ on the other. Both of these, to Alma’s mind, are worthy creeds to live by.

She considers the made-over bulks of Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, the NEWLIFE towers engaging in their double penetration of the sky. About ten days ago, knowing the renovations for the publicly-loathed swindle that they really were, the council had attempted a stealth opening event. Ruth Kelly’s deputy as Minister for Housing, Yvette Cooper, had been ferried in to cut the ribbon early on a Wednesday morning with no prior announcements made, in order to avoid alerting organized protesters. Roman Thompson, obviously, heard all about the covert visit on the night before it happened. Requisitioning a megaphone from local union premises, Roman had turned up bright and early with a hastily convened posse of local anarchists and activists, bringing the sleepy tenants of the maisonettes on Crispin Street out to their balconies by bellowing “GOOD MOOOOOOOORNING, SPRING BOROUGHS” through his borrowed loudhailer. When the pencil-necked Deputy Minister and partner of Brown-aide Ed Balls arrived with the attendant local dignitaries, Roman’s vastly-amplified Old Man of the Sea voice had gleefully regaled them with their recent improprieties. He’d sympathetically asked Labor MP Sally Keeble how well she was sleeping these days, after voting for the Iraq War. He’d loudly paid another councilor a compliment upon how smart he looked and speculated that this might be due to all the backhanders he’d recently received. At this point a policeman had rushed up to Roman and informed him that he couldn’t say that, to which Roman had replied by pointing out, with logic that was unassailable, that he already had. Alma is grinning. It had been an entertaining morning in the Boroughs, from the sound of it.

Reluctantly she turns her gaze back to the side of Bath Street that she’s walking down, the 1930s flat-blocks with the entrance to their central walkway on her left and just ahead. Alma stares at the spot where she is fairly certain that the hulking chimneystack of the Destructor had once stood and instantly her cheerful mental image of Claire’s painting shatters into shellac flakes of green and yellow. These immediately scatter on the wind to be replaced by Alma’s previous notion of the Boroughs and the other districts like it everywhere across the world as concentration neighborhoods: zones where the population could be readily identified by prison uniforms of apron or shiny demob suit if they strayed beyond the boundaries, zones where the inmates could be safely worked, starved or simply depressed to death with no fear of a public outcry. Here in Bath Street they’d even provided the continually smoking tower of an incinerator chimney to enhance the death-camp ambiance.

Alma, who makes little distinction between internal and external reality, doesn’t much care if the Destructor in her brother’s vision is the awful supernatural force that he described it as, or if it’s some hallucinatory and visionary metaphor. As Alma sees things, it’s the metaphors that do all the most serious damage: Jews as rats, or car-thieves as hyenas. Asian countries as a line of dominoes that communist ideas could topple. Workers thinking of themselves as cogs in a machine, creationists imagining existence as a Swiss watch mechanism and then presupposing a white-haired and twinkle-eyed old clockmaker behind it all. Alma believes that the Destructor, even as a metaphor, especially as a metaphor, could easily cremate a neighborhood, a class, a district of the human heart. By the same token then, she must believe that art, her art, anyone’s art, is capable of finally demolishing the mind-set and ideas that the Destructor represents if expressed with sufficient force and savagery; sufficient brutal beauty. Alma has no other choice than to believe this. It’s what keeps her going. Hardening her eyes to the eroded Bauhaus balconies and arches, bricks the color of dried blood, she turns left and begins to head up the long path that separates the two halves of the flats, towards the walled ramp that leads into Castle Street.

The sun absconds behind a cloud and the green lawns turn gray. The ornamental stepped edge of the brickwork, grass-cracked and distressed, takes on a different character. The architecture, neat and modern and efficient in its time, now looks its age, a pre-war civil servant who’d once had a promising career ahead of him but now is in his eighties, haunted and incontinent, incapable of recognizing his surroundings. Past the flats’ drawn curtains are the chambers of a crumbling mind through which the tenants shamble like unfathomable dreams. Outpatients, rock-heads, migrant workers, prostitutes and refugees and transposed flowers like Claire somehow still painting pictures in amid it all, the way that Richard Dadd had labored on his tiny fairy visions in the screaming, defecating hells of Bedlam and of Broadmoor.

Alma realizes that the place is like a grindstone on which reason, sense of self, and sanity are milled to an undifferentiated flour of madness. Mental illness and depression have been stirred into the mortar of these buildings, or have seeped into the plaster as a type of melancholic damp. Attempting to sustain even the ordinary notion of a purpose to existence in this bleak environment would slowly drive you round the bend, would send you cornery. She realizes, wading through the thick air of the central walkway, that insanity occurs most often where a human vision meets the social brickwork. She remembers Pastor Newton’s old hymn-writing colleague, madhouse veteran William Cowper, in 1819, addressing William Blake: “You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – over us all – mad as a refuge from the unbelief of Bacon, Newton and Locke.”

This was a different Newton that the fragile poet was condemning, obviously, not hymn-composing and slave-trading John but Isaac, architect of a material scientific certainty that would supplant the leveling moral apocalypse of his contemporary John Bunyan. Isaac Newton, founding member of the Royal Society and of Freemasonry’s Grand Lodge, brutal commander of the Mint and therefore engineer to a financial system rife with Darien Disasters, South Sea Bubbles, Wall Street Crashes and Black Wednesdays. Instigator of the gold standard and thus of Britain’s gold reserves, which Blair’s chancellor Gordon Brown has quietly sold off just this last year. Sir Isaac, the inventor of an utterly imaginary color, indigo, and the creator of the modern world’s materialistic rat-trap on so many different levels. The great tranquilizer of the spirit, the inducer of what Blake called, accurately, “Newton’s Sleep”. In Bath Street flats, among the destitute and desperate and depressed, she can see all the dreams with which that sleep is troubled.

She breaks from her train of thought to skirt around a recent-looking dog-evacuation that is in her path, a turreted turd-castle that’s as yet unbreached by toddler’s shoe or teenage trainer, perfect end-product of the material world and also its inevitable monument. It gives at least a semi-solid form to the most frequent word, most frequent thought upon the local modern mind, reiterates the creed of the Destructor: “This is where we send our shit, the things that we no longer have a use for. This means you.”

Heading towards the ramp that has replaced the steps that she remembers from her childhood Alma wonders, with a lurch, how many individuals have died down here, how many last breaths have fogged mirrors in unsatisfactory bathrooms or escaped into cramped kitchenettes. It must be hundreds since the flats were put up in the 1930s; all those disappointed souls, their stories worked into the grain of the veneer, encoded in the bar-stripes of the ugly wallpaper. She feels as though she’s walking on the bottom of a sea of ghosts, through suffocating fathoms of unruly ectoplasm reaching far above her. Bed-sand memories and voices rise in clouds of silt at every footstep. Poltergeist shells, astral rubbish, rusted ghoul-cans tumbling through the murk of her periphery. Gray ladies drifting on the sluggish phantom current like a strain of supernatural waterweed. An algae of dead monks. She wades with astronaut deliberation up the ramp, a channel-walker slogging up an underwater rise that might with any luck turn into Dover Beach, uncertain how much longer she can hold her breath beneath this sea of misery, this betiding woe.

Under the concrete of the ramp, the steps she sat on as a child must still be there. She can remember walking home once with her mom and little brother, cutting through from Castle Street to Bath Street. Alma would have been, what, nine or ten? She’d bought a comic from Sid’s bookstall on the market and had run ahead of Doreen so that she could sit here on the steps and read it for a moment while she waited for her mother to catch up. The comic, unsurprisingly, had been Forbidden Worlds. She can’t remember if there’d been a Herbie story in that issue, but it would have certainly contained the work of Ogden Whitney in one form or other. While she’d sat here on her chilly granite perch and marveled, Whitney would have been already more than halfway down the boozy path that led to the asylum and the grave. She has a chilly premonition that somewhere in the year 2050 there is someone having much the same thoughts about her, as if Alma and Ogden are already both together in a pallid green Unknown with all the wolf-men and the Frankensteins; as if the whole world and its future were already posthumous and she was looking down on all this loveless folly from a point outside and over time, from the forbidden world. Everything’s dead already. Everyone is gone.

She steps out onto Castle Street and pauses, noticing the almost instantaneous shift in mood and light. Well, that was interesting. She turns to gaze back down the ramp, along the central path to Bath Street with the NEWLIFE tombstones rising up beyond, and smiles. Fear of decay and death, she thinks. Fear of depreciation, destitution and decline. Is that the best you’ve got?

With a refreshing dodgem whiff of new resolve flaring her nostrils, Alma heads down Castle Street towards the point where Bristol Street bleeds into Chalk Lane. Crossing over the deserted road towards its south side, Alma eyes up the dilapidated Golden Lion, the establishment where Warry had poured out his wild phantasmagoria to her only a year ago. A year. She can’t remember anything about it except painting, drawing, chewing Rizla papers up and spitting them into a bowl, the shifts of season only noticeable in the change of imagery upon her drawing board or easel, a whole summer spent delineating snotty-nosed dead children in soft pencil. And now here she is.

The junction she’s approaching used to have a sweetshop owned by someone that she and the other children knew as ‘Pop’, a white-haired portly chap with glasses who sold homemade penny ice lollies and penny drinks. The latter had been half-pint milk bottles filled up with tap water and homeopathic doses of fruit cordial, a water-memory of having once been shown a molecule of rosehip syrup. Still, on thirsty afternoons, even the immaterial concept of a tasty beverage had been enough. They’d paid their pennies and had gratefully gulped down a fluid that looked pinkish if you happened to be drinking it at sunset. Looking back, she realizes that she should have automatically mistrusted anybody who called themselves Pop. Ah, well. You live and learn.

Down at the bottom end of Castle Street, she passes on her left the little patch of grass, still seemingly unoccupied, where she had almost been abducted as a child. It’s one of the few childhood memories that she still can’t properly resolve, where she’s still not sure what was really going on. Her and some other eight-year-olds had found the rusted shell of an abandoned Morris Minor on the grass and, in an area that offered little in the way of free activities and entertainments, they had treated it as if it were a theme park or at least a proto-bouncy castle. They’d climbed on its bonnet and had sat inside behind its steering wheel. Alma had been on top of the wrecked vehicle, manically jumping up and down on its corroded roof, using it as a heavy metal trampoline, when a black car had glided out of Chalk Lane into Bristol Street to pull up suddenly beside the stretch of turf where they were playing.

When the thin young man with Brylcreemed hair and a dark suit climbed from the driver’s seat and started striding angrily towards the child-infested Morris Minor, all the other kids had been positioned so they could immediately scarper, leaving only Alma stranded on the creaking roof. The man – whenever she tries to remember what he looked like she gets only a false, superimposed photograph of Ian Brady – had grabbed her from atop the wreck and carried her, screaming and wailing, back to his own motor, shoving her inside. There was a youngish woman in the car, with mousy brown hair, although once again Alma’s melodramatic memory has pasted in a shot of Myra Hindley, slightly younger and without the bleach or vampire panda make-up. Alma had been pleading, crying, struggling in the back seat. The young man had said that he was going to take her off to the police station but then had suddenly relented, perhaps when he noticed that the woman with him was by now looking almost as frightened as the tubby, weeping little girl. He’d opened the rear door and let her out onto the pavement before roaring off, leaving her standing sobbing by the roadside for her pals to find when they emerged from hiding. What had all that been about?

Part of her is almost inclined to take the story as it comes. She can quite easily see her would-be abductor as a sour-faced and emotionally strangled young churchgoer of the middle classes and the early 1960s, taking his fiancée for a daring spin through the poor quarter, wanting to impress her with his moral rectitude by scaring straight one of the district’s infant vermin. That seems much more likely than the lurid child-molester narrative she’d retroactively imposed on the scenario, although it doesn’t make her feel a lot less interfered-with, or less angry. She recalls the young man’s pasty skin and his cold little eyes. Whatever he’d imagined he was doing and whatever his intent, he’d been no different from the current rash of curb-crawlers, using the Boroughs as their private zoo. She’d been disturbed to learn that during the alarming weekend of apparent rapes that had occurred last year, one of the victims had reported being dragged into a car in Chalk Lane, almost on the same spot where Alma’s attempted kidnapping had happened. Walking past the unkempt slope of yellow-green she wonders if the place has some malignant genius loci, something in the soil that gives it a predisposition towards a specific crime, repeated down the decades. She remembers hearing that a skeleton had been found at the site during some excavations in the nineteenth century, but doesn’t know if it turned out to be the product of an ancient burial or of a relatively recent murder, doesn’t know if it was male or female, child or adult. Lacking any contradictory evidence, she construes the remains as those of an abduction victim, lonely underneath the earth and calling out for company. Whichever way she looks at it, this is a haunted piece of ground. How typical, then, that she’s chosen this place for her preview.

She turns left into Chalk Lane where she immediately sees the nursery with people moving round inside it, gingerly transporting canvasses from one side of the small space to another. Alma can’t see any obvious signs of damage or catastrophe and feels relieved, although to be quite honest she’s not in the least bit nervous about how tomorrow’s going to turn out. She’s confident that everything will be the way it’s meant to be.

Mounting the short flight of stone steps towards the door, she casts her mind back to when this place was the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen dance school, an oasis of refinement that had been incongruously situated in the Boroughs, not known for its Terpsichorean accomplishments, a place where they discouraged having sex while standing up in case it led to dancing. Her distinguished actor pal Bob Goodman has confessed to having often visited the dance school as a child, presumably back in the days before his face had caught fire and been put out with a shovel. She imagines him, a nervous middle-class kid shuffling up these very steps each Saturday to take his hated lessons, dressed up in a kilt. It’s probably all for the best that little Bob and little Alma never met back then, not with him in a tartan skirt and talking posh. She’d have well kicked his head in.

Pushing open the swing door, Alma takes in the scene. Other than her there are three people present. Visiting from Wales, Burt Regan is the one officially entrusted with getting the pieces down here and set up in the right place, although it seems he’s being helped in this by wiry Roman Thompson. Burt calls out to Alma as she enters.

“ ’Ello, Alma. ’Ere, was that yer finger-armor that I could ’ear rattlin’ when you were comin’ down the street, or ’ave you ’ad yer fanny pierced?”

“Yes, actually, I have. I got a length of anchor-chain from the Titanic that I wear as jewelry. That’s probably what you could hear. It cost me thousands, and it would have been twice that if I’d have bothered to have all the rust scraped off. Hello, Rome.”

Setting Work In Progress up against the makeshift gallery’s end wall, Rome Thompson grins, crumpling the moth-eaten glove puppet of his face, a distressed Basil Brush after the Pytchley Hunt has finished with him. Crafty wrinkles in a windscreen shatter-pattern radiate from eyes that still burn like gunpowder fuzes. Alma thinks that Roman Thompson is quite possibly the most dangerous individual she has ever met, and she means this in an admiring way. Why are the best blokes always gay?

“ ’Ow are yer doin’, Alma? D’yer like ’ow we’ve set up yer exhibition? I’ve been supervisin’, like. Burt needs a foreman so that ’e don’t fuck it up.”

“You lying cunt! I’ve been ’ere since eleven, and this fucker turned up ’alf an ’our back. ’E’s refused to lift a fuckin’ finger ever since. ’E says ’e’s only ’ere in ’is capacity as an art critic. ’E’s like fuckin’ Sister Wendy, only interested in the ones with cocks.”

Leaving the two men to their robust interlocution, Alma sidles over to the nursery’s fourth occupant, a pretty, goggle-eyed young woman standing at the room’s far end and looking moderately intimidated by Roman and Burt, a pair of nutcase ogres from another century. This is Lucy Lisowiec, a representative of the community association CASPAR, a group that provides one of the few remaining neural networks still holding the senile neighborhood together. Alma met her through the Streetlaw rappers, for whom Lucy seems to be a combination of street-credible but sensible big sister and benign probation officer. It was Lucy who managed to secure the nursery for Alma’s exhibition, which means that it’s Lucy’s job that’s on the line if anything goes wrong. This is no doubt the reason why she’s looking nervously at Burt and Roman, who give the impression that there’s something going badly wrong simply by turning up, like uniformed Gestapo officers at a pet funeral. Alma attempts to reassure her.

“Hello, Luce. I can see just from that look you’ve got on your face that these two – well, they’re little more than hired thugs, really – that they’ve managed to offend you. You poor love. You’ve probably heard things that someone your age shouldn’t have to hear, things that will stay with you forever. All I can do is apologize. The man down at the pen said if I didn’t give them work, then they’d be put to sleep.”

Lucy is laughing, showing off her winsome overbite. She really is a little darling, working on a dozen projects with the Boroughs residents at once, minding their kids down at the CASPAR offices in St. Luke’s House on nights when she’s there working late, shepherding Streetlaw to their gigs, living alone above MacDonald’s in the Drapery, developing a stomach ulcer at the age of twenty-seven – Alma has been recently force-feeding her both Actimel and Yakult – all from trying to cooperate creatively with wonderful, deserving people who are also sometimes utter fucking nightmares, Alma herself certainly included in that category.

“Aw, no, they’re all right. They’re house-trained. No, I was just looking at the pictures and the model and all that. Alma, this is fantastic. This is really full-on.”

Alma smiles politely, but is much more pleased than she lets on. Lucy is an accomplished artist in her own right, mostly working in the risky medium of brick and aerosol. The only female tagger in the county and as far as Alma knows one of the only ones in England, Lucy had been forced to start out working solo as the 1-Strong Crew before an influx of new member meant that she could upgrade to the 2-Strong Crew. Under the nom-de-guerre of CALLUZ, an urchin enunciation of the spectrum or of street-worn calluses, she’s beautified a number of unprepossessing premises throughout the years, although she now protests that she’s too old to climb and run. Alma suspects, however, that this façade of responsible maturity is liable to evaporate after a second Smirnoff Ice. Lucy, whatever she pretends, is still an active artist, and so naturally her opinion means a lot to Alma. More than this, though, Lucy’s young, part of a generation that Alma has very little knowledge of and isn’t certain that her work appeals to. If Lucy at least admires her stuff enough not to spray over it in bold metallic Fat Caps with Day-Glo drop-shadow, well, then Alma must be doing something right. She lets herself cast an appraising eye across the works that are already in position, which is to say most of them. She finds, possibly unsurprisingly, that she agrees entirely with Lucy’s assessment of her full-on and fantastic show.

Up at the room’s north end is the large tile arrangement partly cribbed from Escher, mounted on its backing board and titled Malignant, Refractory Spirits. Sharing the same wall as this are a variety of what seem to be illustrations from a children’s picture-book, some in soft pencil monochrome and some in gloriously-realized watercolor, like the psychedelic stand-out image An Asmodeus Flight. The east wall, the biggest one, is dominated by the overwhelming mass of The Destructor, which Alma is pleased to see has been left mostly covered by a hanging cloth: it’s too much, too distressing to stand in its naked glare, just as she wanted it to be. It’s Alma’s Guernica, and she doubts that it’s going to be hanging in the Mitsubishi boardroom any time this century. Quite frankly, she can’t see it hanging anywhere that ordinary decent people who just want to get on with their lives might stumble over it. The painting is so forceful that only the strongest of the smaller pieces can be hung on the same wall. Forbidden Worlds, with its infernal hostelry, goes to the left of The Destructor. When she brings the final painting, Chain of Office, down here to the nursery tomorrow morning, she decides she’s going to hang it on the west wall, facing the more devastating piece as some kind of esthetic counterbalance.

In the middle of the room there are four tables pushed together to support the papier-mâché model that she’d made with all those Rizla papers, chewing them and spitting them into a suitable receptacle. Melinda Gebbie, her best mate, had looked a bit revolted when Alma had demonstrated her technique, which had made Alma try to justify her processes by referencing the book-devouring 1960s visionary John Latham, whom she’d met once and was an admirer of. She’d also tried explaining the importance of using her own saliva, so that in a literal sense her DNA would be part of the complicated structure she was building. In the end she’d given up and confessed that she just liked gobbing.

If she is honest with herself, the model is the only item in the exhibition that she isn’t wholly sure about. It doesn’t seem as if it’s saying much, just sitting there like that, solid and unambiguous. Maybe she’ll see how it goes down tomorrow at the preview and then leave it out of the ensuing London show if she’s not pleased with the response. There’s no point worrying about it now, at any rate. Things tend to sort themselves out, Alma thinks, although she knows that this directly contradicts the laws of physics, common sense, and her political experience of the last forty years.

She looks up from the tabletop display, out through the nursery’s front picture-window, where she notices that Chalk Lane teeters on the brink of dusk. A skinny little mixed-race girl with corn-row hair and a fire-engine red PVC mac is clacking through the umbra, her arms crossed defensively across her chest and a preoccupied expression on her face. Alma thinks ‘crack whore’, then berates herself for her descent into class-profiling and for her lazy and mean-spirited assumptions. By then the young woman has departed, tottering away into the twilight that is gathering in the east, spilling out from Horsemarket and down Castle Street in an obscuring violet avalanche.

Alma stands chatting in the borrowed space with Roman, Burt and Lucy for a little longer. Roman tells her that he’s been out door to door, drumming up interest in tomorrow’s exhibition from among the local populace. She asks him how the cartoon poster that she knocked off for his Defend Council Houses group is selling, and is told that it’s still moving steadily. This image, which depicts a Godzilla-sized ‘fat cat’ looming from behind the NEWLIFE towers to rake through Scarletwell Street’s surface with its monstrous talons, while not a well-drawn piece by her usual standards, had provoked some small controversy. With his keen eye for free publicity Rome had involved the local Chronicle & Echo, thus affiliating Alma publicly with his extremely worthy cause. In the accompanying article had been some rather piqued, dismissive comments from a Conservative councilor, one Derek Palehorse, who’d insisted that he couldn’t see what all the fuss was over when so much was being done to help the neighborhood already. Alma smiles now at the memory. How nice of him to stick his head above the parapet. She can recall the recent scandal when through Roman Thompson’s machinations, the town council’s very generous remuneration of a former colleague had been published in the local paper, prompting councilors to protest that their dealings should never have been made public. When the newspaper had polled its readers to see what their feelings were upon the issue, they’d been startled to discover that most of the votes supported the town council’s right to secrecy. Then they’d found that almost all of these votes had issued from Councilor Palehorse in one way or other. It was mentioned on the “Rotten Boroughs” page of Private Eye, to the deserved embarrassment of everyone concerned. Honestly, Alma thinks. These people. What a bunch of shitclowns. This is a new word that she’s picked up from columnist and splendidly ill-humored television writer Charlie Brooker, whom she wants to marry, and a term which she already can’t imagine how she got along without for all those years, for all that endless line of shitclowns climbing out of history’s collapsing car. Don’t bother, they’re here.

Taking a sudden fancy to the thought of walking home through her old neighborhood, she waves aside the offer of a lift from Burt and kisses everyone goodbye. Rome Thompson hints mysteriously of something that he’s got to tell her but first wants to check his facts; something about the stretch of river next to the gas-holder down on Tanner Street. He says he’ll let her know tomorrow morning at the show. Leaving the others to arrange the last few details and lock up, she zips her jacket to the neck and exits by the swing door, shuffling down the stone steps onto Phenix Street. Glancing towards her left and down Chalk Lane she can see Doddridge Church, with that bizarre door halfway up its western wall. Alma imagines the celestial flyover, the Ultraduct, as she’s depicted it in one of the works that she’s just been looking at, an elevated walkway that seems to be chiseled out of light emerging from the blocked-off loading bay to curve away towards the west, with phosphorescent figures blurring back and forth across its span.

The church itself seems, in her eye, to sum up the combined political and spiritual upheavals that have typified Northampton’s history. It occurs to her that most of these have been linguistic in their origins. John Wycliffe had begun the process in the 14^th century with his translation of the Bible into English. Right there, by insisting that the English peasant classes had a right to worship in their own tongue, Wycliffe and his Lollards were establishing an element of class-war politics in the religious altercation. In Northampton, Lollards and other religious radicals seem to have found a natural home, so that by Queen Elizabeth’s reign in the fifteen-hundreds there are Northamptonshire congregations singing home-made hymns in English rather than just listening to chanted psalms in Latin as the Church demanded. Lacking any earlier examples that spring readily to mind, she wonders if her town is where the English hymn originates. That would explain a lot, now that she thinks about it.

Within fifty years of Queen Elizabeth’s demise, of course, the Civil War kicked off with Parliament greatly emboldened by the radical sects that seemed to be clustered in the English Midlands, all the Ranters, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers, most of them engaged in publishing inflammatory texts or fiery flying rolls. Some of the openly seditious ‘Martin Marprelate’ tracts had been published secretly here in the Boroughs, and in general it seemed that the Protestant revolution hinged upon the word, with painting and the visual arts perceived as the preserve of Papists and elitists. To become a painter would require materials and means, while writing, strictly speaking, required only the most rudimentary education. Obviously, literature was still seen as the sole preserve of the elite, which is just one of many reasons why John Bunyan’s writings, crystal-clear allegories conveyed in common speech, were so incendiary in their day. His hymn, To Be a Pilgrim, was the anthem for the disenchanted Puritans migrating for America, while Pilgrim’s Progress would become a source of inspiration for the New World settlers second only to the Bible, and these weren’t the rakish, courtly witticisms or the fawning tributes of contemporaries such as Rochester or Dryden. These were written by a member of that new and dangerous breed, the literate commoner. They were composed by someone who insisted that plain English was a holy tongue, a language with which to express the sacred.

Of course, they’d banged Bunyan up in Bedford nick for getting on a dozen years, while art and literature are still most usually a product of the middle class, of a Rochester mind-set that sees earnestness as simply gauche and visionary passion as anathema. William Blake would follow Bunyan and, closer to home, John Clare, but both of these had spent their days impoverished, marginalized as lunatics, committed to asylums or plagued by sedition hearings. All of them are heirs to Wycliffe, part of a great insurrectionary tradition, of a burning stream of words, of an apocalyptic narrative that speaks the language of the poor. At the stone meeting house in Chalk Lane, Philip Doddridge pulled all the diverse strands of that narrative together. Hanging out with Swedenborgians and Baptists, taking up his ministry here in the poorest quarter, writing Hark! The Glad Sound!, championing the dissenting cause, all from this scruffy little mound … Doddridge is Alma’s foremost local hero. It’ll be an honor staging her show in the shadow of his church. Alma elects to walk down Little Cross Street and then follow Bath Street round to Scarletwell and her beloved strip of bare grass on St. Andrew’s Road.

She lopes down through the failing light with blocks of flats to either side of her, the Bath Street buildings’ west face on her right and to her left the 1960s landings and the sunken walkways of Moat Place, Fort Place, outlying features of a long-demolished castle become streets where Alma’s great-grandfather Snowy Vernall had lived, getting on a hundred years ago. Mad Snowy, marrying the landlord’s daughter from the long-since disappeared Blue Anchor pub in Chalk Lane, which he’d visited on one of his improbably long strolls from Lambeth. All these chance events, these people and their complicated lives, the trillion small occurrences without which she would not be her; would not be here.

Across the street, incontinent lamps stand apologetically in puddles of their own piss-colored light. She just about remembers when Moat Street and Fort Street were still standing, and when Mrs. Coleman’s gingerbread-house sweetshop was down at the lower end of Bath Street, although Alma was no more than four or five back then. A much more vivid memory remains from slightly later, when the maze of red brick terraces had been demolished and there was just wasteland here, before the blocks of flats had been erected. She remembers playing with the first of many best friends, Janet Cooper, on vast fields of rubble and black mud beneath a dirty fleece of Boroughs sky. For some reason there had been industrial off-cuts scattered everywhere and gingering the puddles, L-shaped bits of metal which Alma and Janet had discovered could be plaited into rusty orange swastikas and skimmed across the demolition site like Nazi throwing-stars. Just as with the abandoned Morris Minor, the brick scree and piled-up devastation were regarded as civic amenities, play areas provided for the district’s young, tetanus crèches of a kind then common in the neighborhood. Mind you, this had been back in the Macmillan years, the later 1950s. Alma and her little pals, flying kites into power lines, opening veins climbing through ragged gaps in corrugated tin, had never had it so good.

She turns left at Little Cross Street’s end, into the bottom part of Bath Street. Now the 1960s housing blocks are on her left, the shabby 1930s elegance of Greyfriars Flats across the darkening road upon her right. As she descends the flow of time becomes more viscous, thickened by historic sediments that have collected near the bottom of the valley. In the settling obscurity around her there are windows lighting up, weak color washes filtered through thin curtains, faded postage stamps fixed to the night with unseen hinges. Everywhere is gluey with mythology.

The district’s different blocks of flats, which were already crowding out the terraced houses even forty years ago, had been no different to the district’s dumped cars or demolished buildings from a child’s perspective. All of it was landscape, meant to be inhabited and climbed and hidden in, its hulks transformed by juvenile imagination into frontier forts, unheard-of planets, a perpetually mutating Gormenghast of slates and splinters. Greyfriars Flats, being the nearest to their house down on St. Andrew’s Road, had always been a second, more expansive back yard to her for as long as Alma can remember, practically an annex to her tombstone-cold front doorstep. One of her two almost-murders had occurred here, the attempted strangling in a dustbin cul-de-sac, and she’s had dreams about the place that were more vivid than her memories. There was the dream where she was dead and confined to the inner washing-line enclosure of the flats, pursued by a mercury-poisoned and moth-eaten version of Carroll’s Mad Hatter round the overcast and dismal purgatory until the end of time. There was the dream with a tall, futuristic tower of blue glass erupting from the flats’ top end on Lower Cross Street, where Alma remembers being shown a quietly humming oblong mechanism with a small display screen upon which all of the universe’s particles were being counted. And of course, this was where Alma had been visited by her first life-transforming vision. Smiling to herself in the congealing twilight, Alma crosses the deserted road to Greyfriars’ southwest corner, carrier-bags swinging from one ornamented fist.

The bottom entrance to the inner rectangle is gated off with black iron rails and has been for some years. Residents only, which she finds entirely understandable. She can still stand there at the gate and peer along the path to where the little patch of shrubbery is partly visible. As she recalls, it had been on a chilly day in early Spring when she’d been eight or nine, sauntering home for lunch from Spring Lane School up at the top of Scarletwell Street. On a whim, she’d taken a diversion through the flats purely because she’d thought it might make a more interesting view than the plain slope of the old hill, the empty playing fields that bordered it, the rear windows of their surviving terrace on St. Andrew’s Road. Idling down the concrete pathways of the block’s interior among the flapping sheets and baby-clothing, she had reached the triangle where all the bushes grew down at the bottom end. She might have walked past and paid the familiar vegetation no attention were it not for the intriguing detail that had caught her junior miniaturist’s eye.

Hung from the thinnest needle of a twig, there on a waxy evergreen, was a translucent white grub that appeared to levitate, so fine was the material by which it was suspended, its minute head blind and glistening. Dangling in the cold crystal of the morning air it curled and shimmied like an escapologist, albeit one whose act worked in reverse and hinged upon secreting his own straitjacket. Twisting and contorting it deliberately wound itself up in the near-invisible strands that it was somehow producing. Alma had stooped closer to the bush in awe, her nose only an inch or two from the dependent caterpillar. She remembers wondering if it was thinking anything and making up her mind that probably it was, if only squishy little caterpillar thoughts.

She’d never witnessed this precise form of activity before, and she had puzzled over why the tiny creature was alone in its pursuit. She’d realized that she must be looking at the manufacture of a rice-grain sized cocoon, but hadn’t previously understood that this was such a solitary operation. It was then that Alma had observed to her relief that the grub had at least one little friend, another pallid maggot that laboriously inched along a nearby shoot, where there were …

Alma had gasped noisily and taken a step back. Reality had shivered, reconfiguring itself before her startled eyes. On every branch, on every twig and under every leaf of the coniferous shrub had been a thousand more identical white worms, all patiently engaged in the same task. The bush itself was an immense white cobweb, suddenly alive with writhing threads of alien purpose. How could she have stood there for five minutes and not noticed this spectacular and otherworldly sight? The moment had been an apocalypse, in the sense that the poets of that school might use the term, people like Henry Treece or Alma’s favorite, Nicholas Moore. She’d realized in that instant that the world about her was not necessarily the way she saw it, that amazing things might constantly be happening under everybody’s noses, things that people’s mundane expectations stopped them from perceiving. Watching what she’d later realized must be silkworms colonize what she’d belatedly construed to be a mulberry bush, she’d formed a vision of the world as glorious and mutable, liable to explode into unlikely new arrangements if you simply paid enough attention; if your eye was in.

She stands there, a suspicious figure peering through black bars and evening murk into the Greyfriars courtyard, and feels phantoms swarming everywhere around her. She is always here at this precise location and this moment, her ordained position in the simultaneous and unchanging 4D gem of space-time. Life is on an endless loop, her consciousness revisiting the same occasions for eternity and always having the experience for the first time. Human existence is a grand recurrence. Nothing dies or disappears and each discarded condom, every dented bottle-top in every alleyway is as immortal as Shamballah or Olympus. She feels the unending marvel of a beautiful and dirty world swell to include her in its fanfare music. Lowering her caked lashes, she imagines everything around her wriggling and alive, suddenly made out of a billion glossy organisms that she has not previously noticed, the whole landscape covered in a spectral gauze, a fresh-spun silk of circumstance.

At length she turns away from the locked gate and carries on down Bath Street into Scarletwell Street and on to St. Andrew’s Road. The short strip of ancestral grass is still the same. As usual she puzzles over the still-standing corner house and tries without success to work out where the Warren residence had once been situated. Actually, she’s pretty sure it was the spot between two young and sturdy trees about halfway along. It feels appropriately eerie, but she can’t be certain. Finally it strikes her that to be stood motionless beside the road down in this quarter of the town might possibly be sending the wrong signals and she turns away to walk the long route home, up Grafton Street to Barrack Road and then around the Racecourse back onto East Park Parade.

Crossing the Kettering Road up by the oddly decorative sheltered tram-stop where the town’s principal gallows at one time resided she is thinking about art in the Charles Saatchi era; art become mono-dimensional commercial gesturing directed at an audience so culturally lost it feels it has no platform from which it can venture criticism. Only other artists – and then only renegades – seemed confident enough in their opinions to effectively mount a rebuttal. She recalls the last time that she’d had Melinda Gebbie over for a memorable meal during which the expatriate American provided an unanswerable critique of Tracy Emin’s work which Alma wishes that she’d said herself: “My God, can you imagine being able to fit all the names of everyone you ever slept with in a tent?” Alma had gaped for a few moments and then soberly put forward her suggestions for capacious venues that might just about accommodate Melinda’s list. The Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter.

Making her way along the gorgeously eroded pavement of East Park Parade she at last reaches her own door, fumbling in her too-tight trouser pockets to retrieve a temporarily elusive key before effecting entry. Inside Alma switches on the lights and winces ruefully at all the mess and clutter. Why can’t she be tidy like a proper adult? Inwardly, she blames it on the influence of Top Cat. When she and her brother Warry were both growing up they’d both aspired to live in a converted dustbin like their feline hero, somewhere where you could just brush your teeth then switch the nearby streetlamp off with a convenient pull-cord before pulling on the battered lid and bunking down. Only much later had she wondered where he spat the toothpaste.

Alma stuffs her peppers, covers them with feta cheese and sticks them in the oven. As they roast she rolls a joint and smokes it while she makes a start on leafing through her copy of New Scientist. After supper she has three or four more reefers while she finishes the science magazine, reads Private Eye and then re-watches two more episodes from the last season of The Wire. Around eleven she stubs out her final fatty of the day, gulps down her Red Rice Yeast pill and her ineffectual Kalms and turns off all the lights before retiring.

Naked underneath her duvet, Alma rests on her right side and pulls a tuck of quilt between her bony knees. Off in the smash and puke of Friday night are sirens, catcalls, curses from over-relaxed young men and women navigating their ways back and forth along East Park Parade. She rubs her feet together, satisfied by the dry rasp of sole on sole. Mulberry cobwebs creep across the inside of her eyelids.

On the edge of sleep, her mind replays an incidental image from the beautifully-written television drama that she’s just been watching: a bandanna-sporting corner-boy sits on his stoop amid the desolated vacant lots or syringe-carpeted back alleys of West Baltimore. The muddily-remembered snapshot brings her suddenly awake with a deep pang of dread and loss that she does not immediately understand. Something about the Boroughs, something about all the neighborhoods that are essentially just like it, right across the world. All of the men and women, all the kids inhabiting this universal landscape of cracked pavements, steel-jacketed grocer shops and meaningless corroded street-names from another century, living their whole lives among these sorry dead-ends with the knowledge that the concrete bollard and the chain-link fence will still be there when they are all long gone, long gone.

A bottle smashes, somewhere off along the Kettering Road. She pushes all the haunting thoughts of ghetto and mortality away, and tries instead to let the revelatory silkworms wrap her in a merciful cocoon of anesthesia.

Alma’s got a big day ahead of her tomorrow.